Regina Hall is on board for Benny Safdie's Lizard Music, joining a stacked cast that already includes Dwayne Johnson, Alicia Silverstone, and Tim Heidecker.
Hall will play the friend and co-worker of the Chicken Man, the eccentric old-timer Johnson is set to portray. 10-year-old newcomer Theo Leber leads the film as the boy at the center of the story.
Safdie adapted the screenplay from Daniel Pinkwater's 1976 novel. The story follows a boy left to his own devices who stumbles upon a secret late-night broadcast of lizards playing otherworldly music, a discovery that opens a hidden door to a wider world and leads him to Johnson's Chicken Man and the man's 111-year-old companion chicken, Claudia.
Johnson has been candid about his physical transformation for the part. In a video posted to Instagram, he described the Chicken Man as channeling "Clint Eastwood at 75 — sinewy muscles, he's lean," adding that he is slimming down to hit that look.
The reunion marks Safdie and Johnson's second collaboration after The Smashing Machine, which earned Safdie the Best Director prize at the Venice Film Festival.
Production on Lizard Music is scheduled to kick off in August, with the film targeting a 2027 release.
