THE TOXIC AVENGER Remake Director Reveals Toxie Was Not Actually Played By Peter Dinklage
The director of The Toxic Avenger remake, Macon Blair, revealed an interesting and surprising video about Peter Dinklage's role in the film. It turns out that while Dinklage does play a pre-transformation Winston Gooze, he is not the person wearing the costume and grotesque prosthetics. They hired a whole different actress for that.
During an interview with Bloody-Disgusting, Blair revealed: “It’s not Peter. It’s a tiny British actress named Luisa Guerreiro. She’s Portuguese. A complete badass. 110 degrees, 30 pounds of foam makeup. Motors all over her face to move the eyebrows and stuff like that."
Now, Dinklage did perform 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.”
So, when we see Toxie brutally murdering people, that’s actress Luisa Guerreiro, and it’s pretty cool! What a wild and cool experience that must’ve been fun for everyone involved!
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.