If you had strolled through Coney Island on Tuesday, October 20, there is a very good chance you walked straight past one of the most famous men on the planet without noticing. An elderly gentleman in a tan bucket hat and a matching coat was ambling along with a slice of pizza in his hand, grey stubble on his chin and age spots on his skin. He looked like somebody’s grandfather enjoying a quiet afternoon by the sea. In fact, he was Dwayne Johnson, hard at work on the Brooklyn set of his next movie, Lizard Music, and the transformation is so complete that even devoted fans are doing a double take at the photographs.
Johnson, 54, was photographed filming scenes for the movie in Coney Island on October 20, 2026, alongside the young actor Theo Clark Leber. In the images, the star wears a tan bucket hat pulled over grey hair, a matching tan coat over a blue shirt, grey pants and a blue tie. His famously clean-shaven head is nowhere to be seen. Instead there is thinning grey hair, grey stubble, carefully applied age spots and earrings in both ears. In one moment captured during filming, he carries a slice of pizza, completing the picture of an eccentric old man rather than an action hero. Johnson plays a character known as The Chicken Man, and by the looks of these first set pictures, he has disappeared into the part entirely.
(Harald Krichel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0))A Transformation Nobody Saw Coming
Part of what makes the pictures so startling is the contrast with the version of Johnson audiences have been seeing lately. In The Smashing Machine he bulked up even beyond his usual imposing frame to play a real-life fighter, and in the live-action Moana he is every inch the towering demigod. The Chicken Man could hardly be further from either. The costume team has swapped muscle for frailty: the shoulders slump inside a loose coat, the wardrobe is all muted tans and blues, and the jewellery — small earrings in both ears — adds to the sense of a man with a long, peculiar life behind him. It is the kind of physical reinvention that actors usually save for awards season, and it is already generating exactly the kind of buzz a production hopes for when cameras start rolling.
Set photos have become a genre of movie news all of their own, but few land with the force of these. Johnson has spent two decades building one of the most recognisable silhouettes in Hollywood; hiding it is practically a special effect in itself. Every detail in the Coney Island pictures pulls in the same direction, from the wire of grey in his hair to the unhurried, slightly stooped way the character carries his pizza. If the goal was to make the world look twice, the mission is accomplished.
Back With Benny Safdie
The film reunites Johnson with director Benny Safdie, marking their second collaboration. Their first, The Smashing Machine, cast Johnson as Mark Kerr, the mixed martial arts fighter whose rise and struggles defined an early era of the sport in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That performance was widely read as a statement of intent: Johnson wanted to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor, and he was willing to change his body and his image to do it. Returning to Safdie so quickly suggests the experience meant as much to him as the reviews did. Directors rarely get a second film with a star of Johnson’s scale unless the first one built real trust, and actors of his scale rarely say yes twice unless they believe the work is pushing them somewhere new.
(Harald Krichel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0))Safdie’s style is a long way from the glossy franchise filmmaking Johnson built his name on. His movies tend to be intimate, anxious and grounded, often following characters who live slightly outside the margins of ordinary life. An elderly eccentric wandering Coney Island fits that worldview perfectly. Where The Smashing Machine asked Johnson to find the fragility inside a fighter, Lizard Music appears to ask something stranger still: to find the warmth and mystery inside a man the rest of the world barely notices.
A Strange Little Book Becomes a Movie
The source material is as offbeat as the casting. Lizard Music is based on the children’s book of the same name by Daniel Pinkwater, a beloved author whose stories have delighted young readers for decades with their gentle absurdity. According to a Deadline report published on October 19, the story follows a young boy who stumbles onto a secret late-night broadcast of lizards playing otherworldly music — a discovery that opens a door into a hidden, magical corner of his everyday world. It is not the obvious next project for the world’s biggest action star, which is precisely what makes it so interesting.
(Dian Li / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0))Johnson is joined in the cast by Alicia Silverstone, Rachel McAdams and Colman Domingo, a trio of acclaimed performers that underlines the film’s ambitions. Sharing scenes with Leber, a child actor carrying the story’s sense of wonder, Johnson’s Chicken Man looks set to be the bridge between the ordinary world and the lizard-music mystery at the film’s heart. Production details, including a release date, are still under wraps, but if these first photographs are anything to go by, Lizard Music may end up being the most talked-about left turn of Johnson’s career — an elderly man, a slice of pizza, and a secret broadcast after midnight.
What the Photos Really Tell Us
There is also something quietly fitting about the location. Coney Island has always been a place where New York comes to be a little stranger than usual — part seaside resort, part carnival, part time capsule — and a story about a boy, a mysterious old man and music that should not exist could hardly ask for a better front door. Locals who gathered to watch the filming seemed to grasp the joke quickly: the most recognisable man in movies was standing in plain sight, and almost nobody recognised him until the cameras and crew gave the game away. For a production that has kept its details close, the pictures function as a perfect first trailer all by themselves. They promise whimsy without explaining it, transformation without a press release, and a movie star enjoying the one luxury his fame usually denies him — being just another face on the boardwalk.