'A white Morgan Freeman': fans react to the first photos of Dwayne Johnson in his elderly man role
Gray hair, deep wrinkles, a slice of pizza, and a fanbase arguing about the Rock's skin tone — the set photos did numbers for every wrong reason.
On October 20, paparazzi shots from a Brooklyn set went viral showing a frail, white-bearded 70-year-old in a tan bucket hat eating pizza next to a kid holding an oversized lizard plush. The old man is Dwayne Johnson.
The film is Lizard Music, Benny Safdie's adaptation of Daniel Pinkwater's cult 1976 children's novel. Johnson plays the Chicken Man — an eccentric street sage who travels with an 85-year-old chicken and befriends a boy named Victor (Theo Clark Leber).
The transformation is the work of Kazu Hiro, the prosthetics master who recently aged Tom Cruise into a geriatric oil baron for Digger.
It is thorough enough that the internet's first reaction was authentication, not admiration — "How do we know that it's him?" ran one representative comment. The second reaction was the one that named this article.
"bro literally looks like a white morgan freeman"
— an X user, summarizing a discourse that also produced Malkovich and Schwarzenegger comparisons
A parallel thread asked, less charitably, "Did they turn him white?" — and the replies split between people reading the makeup as whitewashing and people pointing out that elderly prosthetics plus gray stubble read pale on camera regardless of the actor underneath.
Alongside both camps ran a third: fans alarmed by how much slimmer the 54-year-old looks, months after he bulked up by around 30 pounds to play MMA fighter Mark Kerr.
The Safdie of it all
Lizard Music is Johnson and Safdie's second film together, greenlit while their first, The Smashing Machine, was earning Johnson the best reviews of his career and some of the worst box office. That context explains the swing.
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The ensemble Safdie assembled around him reads like a dare: Alicia Silverstone, Regina Hall, Colman Domingo, Jeff Goldblum, Rachel McAdams, Tim Heidecker, David Krumholtz and Andrew Dice Clay, with the film dated for Christmas 2027.
Pinkwater's novel — a boy left home alone discovers a band of lizards playing on late-night TV and follows the mystery with the Chicken Man as his guide — is beloved, surreal, and precisely zero percent franchise material. For an actor whose last decade was built on playing recognizable variations of Dwayne Johnson, that's the pitch.
The most famous body in Hollywood just spent two films in a row making itself disappear.
The healthiest sign for the movie might be the confusion itself. Nobody argued about whether the Chicken Man looked cool; they argued about whether he was real.
For a star whose critics' main charge was that you could always see the Rock through the character, a comment section full of people who can't find him is the first good review.
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