When “Footloose” and “The Toxic Avenger” arrived in theaters within weeks of each other in early 1984, about the only thing they had in common was that they were both, well, movies.
“The Toxic Avenger” was a low-budget indie horror comedy about a mutant superhero that featured a no-name cast awash in buckets of fake blood and gore producer-director Lloyd Kaufman splashed on screen.
“Footloose” was a flashy musical drama from Paramount Pictures that made Kevin Bacon a star, featured other young actors such as Sarah Jessica Parker and Chris Penn, and ended up the seventh-biggest box office hit of the year.
Flash forward four decades to this week’s release of a new version of “The Toxic Avenger” that stars Bacon as Bob Garbinger, the new villain in the narrative.
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And this time, the cast includes plenty of well-known actors, too. In addition to Bacon, Peter Dinklage plays Winston Gooze, who’s transformed into the Toxic Avenger when he falls into a vat of glowing green goo at the environmental nightmare of a factory run by Garbinger.
Elijah Wood is Fritz Garbinger, Bob’s odd, subservient younger brother, Jacob Tremblay is Wade Gooze, Winston’s stepson, and Taylour Paige, who starred with Bacon in 2024’s “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” is the activist trying to expose the toxic disaster the factory has created.
Bacon says he knew of the original movie but hadn’t seen it until he was approached for the reboot.
“I don’t remember ever having seen it,” he says on a recent video call. “I was probably in my own naivete kind of watching highbrow (stuff), you know.
“So of course I went back and revisited not only it, but also just the world of Troma,” Bacon says of Kaufman’s long-running independent studio known for its low-budget B-movie genre comedies. “I was really just knocked out by it.
“It’s funny. Like, now I’m much more on the lookout for those types of movies than when I was younger. One of the things I love about the whole Troma world is it’s a combination of super-grassroots indie filmmaking, scraping things together and making things for a dime.
“But not making ‘My Dinner With Andre,” he says of the 1981 indie film that was brainy in a much less gruesome way than a typical Troma movie. “They’re not sort of highbrow, intellectualized or emotional dramas or shooting for an Oscar.
“They’re just popcorn movies, and I really appreciate that and admire what Lloyd did with that whole world. I think it’s pretty cool.”
“The Toxic Avenger” opens in theaters on Friday, Aug. 29.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Bacon talked about how he knows when to take any particular role, why he doesn’t think there’s much difference between playing a villain or a hero, what it was like on location with his fellow castmates, and more.
Q: This is not a prestige drama or a romantic comedy or anything you’ve really done before. What got you on board for it?
A: You know, Macon [Blair, the director] hit me up and said, “I’m doing this movie.” I read it, and I thought, OK. We started to talk about the guy, because that’s really what it always comes down to for me: Who’s the guy? Have I played him before? Do I have a point of view about how to do it, like, do I hear the voice? Do I see him?
That’s not to say that that wouldn’t change, or that the director and I might disagree on what that would be. But at least as a starting point, like, to get an image and an idea of how I might walk in this man’s shoes.
Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t. If it doesn’t happen right away, then I’m going to have a harder time talking myself, or somebody will have a harder time, talking me into it.
But if I see it, like I saw this Bob character – and Macon is also a guy who is very collaborative and really wanted to just go for it – so we had a lot of fun figuring out what this guy was going to walk like and talk like and look like and all those things.
Q: When you could see this guy, how did you come to see him?
A: I saw him as a kind of combination of a televangelist, of a self-help guru, and of the modern version of the billionaire class. The modern version of the billionaire class is very different than the billionaires of the past. They were more private people, right? They weren’t in your face. They didn’t have a brand. They sold (stuff) or they traded money or raped and pillaged the land. Whatever they did, they did it privately.
Now it’s kind of the opposite. Like, if you’re the billionaires of today, they want you to know who they are and all that. So that’s kind of where Bob is. And listen, it’s narcissism. He is a tireless narcissist. So that was the starting point.
Then the details of that relationship with his minions, and his brother, all these things, they just kind of started to fall into place.
Q: You’ve played other villains or bad guys, obviously. Is it fun to be the bad guy? More than if you’re the hero?
A: I don’t really feel that way, honestly. I think it’s not so much about bad guy versus good guy when it comes to fun. What’s not fun are characters that are one-note and underwritten or not complicated. If the writer doesn’t give some depth of character to the bad guy, then it’s not going to be fun. You can sometimes tell they’re written, and it just looks like evil or it’s just a (jerk). Then you go, whatever, that’s not that interesting to me.
So it’s not when I get a script, I go, “Ooh, the bad guy!” I get a lot of bad guys, but it’s the exact same thing with the hero. If the hero is complicated and has some darker side to him or some questionable elements to his moral character, that’s a hero that you want to play.
So I really like doing both. The fun to me is a well-written character, a good creative experience between a director who has a respect for the actors and what they are willing to bring to the part, and the other performers. Like in “Toxic Avenger,” you get on set and you can really play.
Q: I did want to ask you about that – acting with Peter and Elijah and Taylour. They must be fun people to work with.
A: Totally, totally.
Q: You went ahead and did the “Beverly Hills Cop” movie with Taylour right after this, too.
A: Yeah, and we were kind of in this similar sort of situation. [Bacon’s the bad guy, Paige is trying to expose his crimes.] Completely different characters, and a completely different world. But it was just funny that we were back doing that again.
She’s awesome, Peter’s awesome, Julia [Davis, who plays Bob’s adoring assistant], Elijah, all of them. Macon is one of those guys that he’s always kind of writing, or also very much into the improvisational piece of it. Which is not something that I am. I’m not Upright Citizens Brigade, not Second City. That’s not my background.
But what I’ve learned over the years is that if I’ve really done the homework on the man, I’ve learned my lines, I know who he is. If I really know him, then you if you throw me into a situation even without the dialogue, I can be him. And that’s kind of what happened on this set.
I couldn’t tell you, because I don’t even know if I have the script anymore. I think most of it was on the page, but we did a lot of improvisation. I’m sure there’s some very, very fun outtakes where people were just getting a chance to play, and Macon was very encouraging of that.
So it was great. They were a great group of people to work with.