Troma Entertainment… in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con… in the year of our Lloyd Kaufman 2025? You better believe it. The cult hero rises again in The Toxic Avenger, a title that’s still popular enough 40-plus years after the release of the original Toxic Avenger to command the convention’s largest meeting room.
With that panel came an in-room-only sneak peek at the unrated horror comedy; as the marketing for Macon Blair’s long-awaited reboot has teased (it premiered back in 2023 at Fantastic Fest and finally hits theaters next month), it was as gruesome and goofy as you’d expect. Fans not in Hall H will have to wait to see the scene—showing just how Peter Dinklage’s Winston Gooze transforms from struggling janitor to irradiated superhero—at their local theaters. But we’re here to tell you what the panel had to say about their new film.
The Toxie panel featured writer-director Blair as well as Troma co-founder Kaufman (surely the only person to have cameos in both The Toxic Avenger and Superman this year) and the stars of the movie: Peter Dinklage, Elijah Wood, Taylour Paige, and Jacob Tremblay. (Kevin Bacon also appeared in a video message apologizing for his absence, but sounding very jazzed that the movie is finally coming out soon.)
From the stage, Blair explained how he approached recapturing the spirit of the Troma classic while also updating it for the 21st century. “It was more like the vibe of the originals that we wanted to carry into this movie. I didn’t feel like we wanted it to be the exact same story beat for beat because the first one is so singular and it’s done so perfectly,” he said. “It’s like, why follow in those exact footsteps? But I felt like if we could get the spirit and the heart of the original with a new character, with a [new] journey, then that would be the best way into it. So I wanted it to feel like the original as much as possible.”
Asked if he had any “non-negotiables,” Blair pointed out the obvious. “Well, I mean, you knew that [Toxie] had to have a tutu, you knew he had a mop, and I was pretty insistent that it was going to be a performer in a suit … we didn’t want to do a CGI version. I felt like that’s what people would expect, a performer in a suit,” Blair said. “I wanted it to be rated R, just so that it could have the goopy goodness that people would expect. And I also feel like those [original Toxic Avenger movies] are actually, [despite] the kid getting run over by a car and all this going on, very sweet, you know? There’s a real sweetness to them. And I wanted to carry that over as well, too, and have it be in spite of all the blood and guts, or in addition to the blood and guts.”
Dinklage, who voices Winston throughout the movie but shares the on-screen performance with stunt double Luisa Guerriero, spoke about what it was like collaborating on the role.
“Over 70% of my performance is not me. It’s Luisa, our incredible stunt body double who [was] in the Toxie prosthetic suit in 100-degree weather for three months in Bulgaria,” the Game of Thrones star recalled. “I shot for about four weeks at the beginning of the movie, and then Luisa took over, and she did everything that you see as the toxic creature. For me that was a real exercise in trust in relinquishing something that was really important to me, but we knew going in that was the deal. [It was] part of the agreement, and it turned out to be the best decision … because you put me in that in 100-degree weather, and you’re going to hear the inner diva in me.”
All joking aside, “It was sort of perfect because then we laid down all my voice on top of it in [post-production]. Luisa and I rehearsed—she studied all my movements like a hawk and does a better me than I do me. So that was sort of a leap of faith and trust that I had to overcome, which turned out to be absolutely exhilarating for me.”
Another big transformation in the movie: Wood’s creepy character, Fritz. No stunt double necessary, but as you can see from The Toxic Avenger trailers, the Lord of the Rings actor has never quite looked like this before.
“The moment I got in the script, making sense of the conceptual drawing of what Fritz was going to look like, I was so thrilled,” Wood recalled. “Greasy, stringy hair, mostly bald … hunched over with a cane, sickly. [Then I] read the character, and [he] was unlike anything I’d ever played. The opportunity to transform is really fun. It’s so fun to get to play in that sandbox, and what Macon did with this film was create a really fucking cool sandbox for all of us to mess around and play around in. It was a total blast.”
Blair was asked to name the most challenging stunt in the movie, and he was careful not to give too much away. “There was one where, just to skirt around a spoiler, somebody ends up, say, hypothetically, head-first in the engine block of a car. It gets turned on, and they get kind of ground up, sort of Cuisinart style. That was just a lot of moving parts and pumping fluids that we had to coordinate. It took a lot of trial and error, but we finally got it right. But that was probably the steepest hill of the climb.”
As for Toxie’s original creator and biggest champion—legendary Troma Entertainment boss Kaufman, who co-founded Troma in 1974 and directed the original Toxic Avenger film in 1984—he’s just thrilled the people who made his company what it is are getting such a fun new chapter.
“Troma is a fan-run, fan-fueled company. Everybody who’s ever worked or been in our movies—they’re all fans. It’s all our employees. I mean, James Gunn was a fan who worked for us, and so were many others. Fan-fueled, we’ve been so lucky,” he said, adding to his earlier remark that “It’s thanks to the fans that Troma is here.”
The new era of Troma begins soon: The Toxic Avenger opens August 29.
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