Rachel McAdams has joined the voice cast of Benny Safdie’s Lizard Music, adding another name to a film that is already building a crowded ensemble. Colman Domingo, Jeff Goldblum and David Krumholtz are also aboard in voice roles, though the production has not said who any of them will play.
The casting update is the reason the project is drawing fresh attention now. For readers tracking McAdams, it marks a move into a live-action/CGI hybrid film from Amazon MGM Studios and United Artists that already has Dwayne Johnson attached as a star and producer. The picture is based on Daniel Pinkwater’s novel Lizard Music, and it centers on a boy who finds a secret late-night broadcast of lizards making otherworldly music.
That search leads him to The Chicken Man, a role played by Johnson, and to his 85 year-old chicken named Claudia, a detail that gives the story its stranger edge. Safdie wrote the script from the novel, and the cast list now stretches well beyond the four newly highlighted voice performers to include Theo Leber, Alicia Silverstone, Tim Heidecker, Arya Parvathi, Regina Hall and Andrew Dice Clay. Even so, the roles for McAdams, Domingo, Goldblum and Krumholtz remain under wraps, which keeps the focus on the names rather than the parts.
For now, the new casting tells readers what is moving: the ensemble is filling out, and McAdams is part of it. What is still missing is the one detail that would turn a cast announcement into a clearer picture of the film itself — which character she will voice, and how soon the project moves beyond this stage.
