Dwayne Johnson Describes 'Lizard Music' as a Safdie-Twisted 'Willy Wonka'

Dwayne Johnson has never been an actor content to stay in his comfort zone, and his latest creative partnership offers perhaps the most striking evidence yet of that restless ambition. Back on set with director Benny Safdie, Johnson is currently shooting Lizard Music — a project he describes in terms that suggest something genuinely unlike anything in his filmography.

A Reunion With Benny Safdie

The collaboration between Johnson and the Safdie brothers has already produced one of the more talked-about transformations in recent Hollywood memory with The Smashing Machine, the biographical drama that demanded a radical physical reinvention from its star. Now, according to Deadline, Johnson confirmed at D23 that the two are once again in business together, and that full production on Lizard Music is already underway. "That's my guy," Johnson said of Safdie, a filmmaker best known for the kinetic, anxiety-drenched realism of films like Uncut Gems and Good Time — work that sits about as far from blockbuster formula as cinema gets.

The pairing is, on paper, an unusual one. Benny Safdie made his name crafting street-level portraits of desperate people caught in spiraling situations, deploying naturalistic cinematography and abrasive sound design to put audiences viscerally inside his characters' heads. Johnson, meanwhile, has spent much of his career as the gravitational center of franchise entertainment. That tension, however, may well be precisely what makes the partnership so compelling.

Five Hours in the Chair

Among the details Johnson shared, perhaps the most telling is the sheer physical commitment the role demands. To portray a man in his seventies, Johnson submits to a five-hour prosthetic makeup process every single day on set — a grueling discipline that echoes the kind of transformative dedication audiences saw in his work preparing for the live-action Moana. For an actor of Johnson's stature to willingly disappear beneath layers of age makeup each morning speaks to both the project's ambitions and his own evolving priorities as a performer.

The hours in the makeup chair are not merely a cosmetic exercise. They represent a deliberate attempt to shed the physical identity — the size, the youth, the immediately recognizable presence — that has defined Johnson's screen persona for two decades. Age makeup at that level of commitment forces a performer to locate character from the inside out rather than relying on the surface charisma that comes so naturally.

'Willy Wonka From the Mind of Benny Safdie'

The most intriguing piece of intelligence Johnson offered, however, was his own loose description of the film's tone. He framed Lizard Music as imagining Willy Wonka filtered through Benny Safdie's sensibility — a shorthand that is deliberately paradoxical. Roald Dahl's original story, and its most celebrated screen adaptation with Gene Wilder, is a fable about wonder and moral consequence dressed in whimsy. Safdie's cinema, by contrast, trades in dread and psychological pressure. The suggestion that those two worlds might be synthesized into a single experience positions Lizard Music as something genuinely difficult to categorize, which is arguably the most exciting place for a film to exist.

For Johnson, the project continues a clear creative pivot. Whether he is voicing Maui in the live-action Moana or reportedly eyeing a Broadway turn alongside Kevin Hart, the throughline is an actor actively seeking registers and contexts that challenge audience assumptions about what he can do. Lizard Music, with its eccentric premise and demanding physical transformation, looks like the most ambitious expression of that instinct so far.

What to Expect

Production details beyond Johnson's D23 comments remain tightly held, which is consistent with the Safdie brothers' general approach to publicity — they tend to let the finished work speak rather than building hype through incremental disclosure. What is clear is that the film is moving, that its star is all-in on the transformation required, and that the creative vocabulary Johnson is reaching for — somewhere between Dahl's imagination and Safdie's unease — promises something that will demand to be taken seriously.