October 21: The Rock, Hidden in Plain Sight

One of the most recognizable faces on Earth walked through Brooklyn yesterday, and almost nobody would have known it was him.

The first set photos from Dwayne Johnson’s new film, Lizard Music, appeared yesterday, and they’re hard to believe. Filming on the streets of Coney Island, the 54-year-old star was buried under a gray wig, a beard, and layers of prosthetic aging, transformed into a stooped, eccentric man in his seventies. For an actor whose face and physique have sold billions of dollars’ worth of movie tickets, it’s an unusual vanishing act, and it’s the latest sign of how far he is willing to move away from the action-hero image that made him famous. See the set photos of Johnson’s transformation here.

The Chicken Man of Coney Island

Johnson plays the Chicken Man, the mysterious older figure at the center of Daniel Pinkwater’s 1976 children’s novel. In the photos, he wears a tan bucket hat, a trench coat, and a patterned tie, and carries a slice of pizza as he walks beside young co-star Theo Clark Leber, who holds an oversized plush lizard. The look comes from Kazu Hiro, the makeup artist who won Oscars for turning Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour and Charlize Theron into Megyn Kelly in Bombshell. Johnson has said the process takes about five hours in the makeup chair every day. He also lost 30 pounds of muscle to make his frame believable as a man two decades older. The film reunites him with director Benny Safdie, who directed him in last year’s The Smashing Machine, and Amazon MGM Studios plans to release it in theaters on Christmas Day 2027.

Movie makeup has always been about this kind of disappearing act. In the 1920s, Lon Chaney was known as “the Man of a Thousand Faces” for painting and sculpting himself into monsters. In 1970, the legendary artist Dick Smith aged Dustin Hoffman to 121 years old for Little Big Man, and two years later he helped turn Marlon Brando into Don Corleone. Smith later became Kazu Hiro’s mentor, so the Coney Island photos belong to a line of craft that runs back more than half a century.

An elderly man in a bucket hat and trench coat walking with a young boy holding a plush lizard along a Coney Island street

Against the old amusements of Coney Island, Hollywood’s latest transformation took to the streets of Brooklyn.

For Johnson, the shoot is personal as well as professional. He wrote that he had never before starred in a film shot in New York City, and he has described Lizard Music as a story in the spirit of Willy Wonka, filtered through Safdie’s offbeat imagination. Audiences will have to wait more than a year to see the finished film. Until then, the photos from Coney Island have already done something rare in a career built on being instantly recognizable: they made people look twice and still not see him.