Ten-year-old Chicago-area actor Theo Clark Leber has landed the lead role opposite Dwayne Johnson in Benny Safdie's *Lizard Music*, an adaptation of Daniel Pinkwater's 1976 novel being made for Amazon MGM Studios and United Artists. The casting marks the feature film debut for the fourth-grader, following a lengthy casting process, and represents a potentially significant career break in a project reuniting Johnson with Safdie after their collaboration on *The Smashing Machine*.

The live-action/CGI hybrid follows a boy, played by Leber, who discovers a secret late-night broadcast of lizards playing music and is drawn into a search for answers alongside an eccentric character called The Chicken Man, played by Johnson, and his 111-year-old chicken companion, Claudia. Producers include United Artists' Scott Stuber and Nick Nesbitt, Safdie for his Out for the Count Productions, Johnson for Seven Bucks Productions, and David Koplan of Magnetic Fields Entertainment. Leber, from Evanston, Illinois, was most recently seen on stage in *Leopoldstadt* at Writers Theatre in Glencoe.