In Elijah Wood’s latest role, he’s like you’ve never seen him before.
The 42-year-old actor stars as Fritz Garbinger in Macon Blair’s upcoming remake of the 1984 superhero cult classic The Venomous Avenger, who Entertainment Weekly shared a sneak peek of Wednesday.
A photo of Wood shows him with dark wisps of hair surrounding a half-bald head, dark eye makeup and black teeth.
Blair said EW that Wood’s look was partly inspired by Riff Raff from Rocky Horror Movie Show and Danny DeVito’s 1992 Penguin Batman returns “mixed together”.
“The look came about after conversations I had with our designers and with Elijah himself,” added the director. “I wanted it to feel like a Peter Sellers performance where he just becomes invisible. The idea is that you forget that this is the Elijah you know Lord of the Rings or anything else.”
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Peter Dinklage d Venomous avenger (2023).
Legendary Pictures
Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage to star in The Toxic Avenger Reboot
Original Venomous avenger starred Mark Torgl as Melvin, a New Jersey janitor who, after being pushed into a vat of toxic waste, becomes disfigured and fights bad guys as a superhero named Toxie.
The film spawned three sequels: The Venomous Avenger Part II (1989), The Venomous Avenger Part III: Toxie’s Last Trial (1989), i Citizen Toxie: The Venomous Avenger IV (2000). The franchise also had a short animated children’s TV show, Poison Crusadersa stage musical, a video game and a Marvel comic.
Peter Dinklage leads the new film as Winston Gooze/The Toxic Avenger. And according to Blair, 48, “Much like the original Toxic Avenger, he’s uniquely unqualified to be a hero.”
“He’s not particularly brave, he’s not particularly cunning, but his heart is in the right place and he starts pushing it to the limit when he’s cornered,” the director told EW.
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Enter Kevin Bacon Venomous avenger (2023).
Legendary Pictures
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“There was a horrible industrial accident that made him a mutant and an outcast, but it also gave him some super strength and super abilities that set him on a path to become an unlikely vigilante in this downward spiraling society,” Blair added.
In addition to Wood and Dinklage (54), the film also stars Jacob Tremblay, Taylor Paige, Julia Davis, Jonny Coyne and Kevin Bacon.
Bacon, 65, plays Fritz’s brother Bob Garbinger, who is “kind of a henchman in this corrupt company” and who is seen as a “golden god,” in contrast to Wood’s “downfall of the family” character.
As Blair said EWBob is in the “Lex Luthor mold, where they have all this money and resources at their disposal, but he’s just a disaster.”
Venomous avenger has its world premiere Thursday at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education