THE TOXIC AVENGER Remake Director Reveals Toxie Design Was Originally "More Monstrous"
There’s been a lot of hype on the internet regarding Legendary’s upcoming remake of Troma’s The Toxic Avenger. The teaser trailer that was released seemed to stir up some excitement. We still have yet to see a full reveal of Toxie. The only footage we’ve seen of him features the "freaky folk hero" shrouded in a shadow.
Director Macon Blair recently talked about Toxie’s design and revealed that his original redesign for his movie was even more monstrous, and looked "like a zombie." While talking to Collider, Blair shared:
"You know what? He started out way more — what would be a way to say it — more like a zombie, more like rotted off, and much more monstrous. We went through a series, just when we were in the art phase, and we had a couple of really great artists, one was named Vanessa Menendez and one was named Jonas McCluggage, he's a comic book artist, she's a painter. I was really exploring some real Night of the Living Dead-type looks and then we kind of took a second look at that and as it went further along, we tried to humanize him a bit more so that even though he's got all these boils — I'm not sure if people will have seen the movie when they watch this or not, but it's no spoiler that he looks gross — he's got boils and warts and blisters, he's got one super distended eye, but within that you can still see a lot of humanity. And so we pushed the monster side of things really far and then walked that back."
While that sounds intriguing, I’m still curious about the design that is actually used in the movie, the design we haven’t even seen yet. In a previous interview, it was revealed that Toxie is played by two different actors. Peter Dinklage plays the character Winston Gooze before he turns into Toxie, and he voices the character and an actress named Luisa Guerreiro is the person in the mask and costume. She’s described as “a complete badass. 110 degrees, 30 pounds of foam makeup. Motors all over her face to move the eyebrows and stuff like that."
Dinklage performed all of Toxie's scenes on tape so that Guerreiro could memorize his voice inflections and movements for the movie. The filmmaker went on to explain how they went about bringing Toxie to life:
"What she did was, and this is why I get so excited talking about it, Peter performed the whole movie on videotape as Toxie. Just himself. But making the choices, delivering the lines, physical choices, how fast he’s running all of it. There’s a video version of him just in a white room playing the whole movie. Luisa takes those tapes home, memorizes them, and studies them. She plays Teletubbies and Oompa Loompas. She’s like a physical performer. So, she’s studying his gait and his timing, his pauses, his line delivery, all of that. She replicates that on set, and then Peter, six months later, comes back and reinterprets the voice based on what she did. So, Toxie is actually Luisa playing Peter with Peter’s voice playing Luisa.”
Here’s the description of the film:
While the original film (which premiered in 1984 – almost 40 years ago!) followed the fate of Melvin Ferd Junko III (Mitch Cohen), who goes from zero to toxic hero in a case of bullying gone awry, Macon Blair’s contemporary take follows a hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength all his own.
Peter Dinklage stars as downtrodden janitor Winston Gooze who, after falling into a vat of toxic waste, becomes none other than The Toxic Avenger. This timely reimagining is up to its eyeballs in environmental themes as Winston goes up against the evil forces of greed and corruption to save his son, his friends, and his community. Even as this story exists on its own terms, the spirit undoubtedly remains connected to the original. Troma fans old and new will be pleased to know that the film has been rated “R” for violence and gore – as per Troma tradition.
The movie also stars Elijah Wood, Julia Davis, Taylour Paige, Kevin Bacon, and Jacob Tremblay. There’s no release date yet.
We will probably see some early concept designs once the movie is in theaters, but for now, fans would be happy with just one clear look at Toxie!
Though Dinklage did the voice, Blair has previously revealed that a British actress named Luisa Guerreiro is actually under the mounds of prosthetics.