If you were a kid browsing the shelves of a movie rental store in the 1980s, the cover of"The Toxic Avenger"was an R-rated beacon of awesome, with a mutated superhero wielding a mop while dressed in a tutu in front of an American flag. Not that your parents were going to let you rent it.Peter Dinklage's didn't: Growing up in New Jersey, home entertainment meant reading books and watching "Masterpiece Theatre" on a small black and white TV, he says. So decades before the"Game of Thrones"actor was cast in a remake of 1984's "Toxic Avenger," he watched the infamous splatter comedy at a friend's house. "I don't know what is taboo these days, but back then, it felt taboo. 'Should we be watching this? This is incredible!' I just ate it all up. I loved it," Dinklage, 56, reminisces. Join our Watch Party!Sign up to receive USA TODAY's movie and TV recommendations right in your inbox The Emmy-winning star might be in New York City now doingShakespeare in the Park, but he embraces cinema shlock with the ultra-gory andunrated new "Toxic Avenger"(in theaters Aug. 29). Winston Gooze (Dinklage) is a hard-luck widower and stepdad working as a janitor for a shady corporation that won't pay for meds to treat his terminal illness. After meeting a whistleblower (Taylour Paige) aiming to reveal the company's poisonous shenanigans, Winston runs afoul of punk-band baddies who toss him and his radioactive mop into a toxic-waste pool, and the reluctant superdude becomes a popular folk hero standing up for the people who need him. Director Macon Blair originally thought of Dinklage for the movie's villainous CEO (played by Kevin Bacon), then decided Winston seemed a better fit. "I really wanted someone who the audience could get really sympathetic with super-quick so that when the transformation does happen, they want the best for him and they're on his side," Blair says. "I felt Peter would be such a great secret weapon to use in that capacity." Dinklage says he listened to a lot of Motörhead and Ozzy Osbourne to get into the mind of an aging metalhead who's "insecure at all times but has an angry side to him." And while Winston has the worst things happen to him, Dinklage always played it heartbroken instead of funny ("Characters don't know they're in a comedy"). Even with superpowers, he's still as much of an underdog as ever – he just feels bad when he rips a guy's jaw off with a swing of his mop. "That was sort of the gag: He would have all that at his disposal but he wouldn't really know what to do with it," Blair says. "He's still the same dude he was 30 seconds ago. He just looks like a disaster." Winston's transformation scene is bonkers, as a yelling Dinklage is shot through a psychedelic dream sequence and a face-melting rock version of Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain" plays. It's an impressionistic, nightmarish homage to Hitchcock's "Vertigo," the tornado scene in "The Wizard of Oz" and "those movies that only did it because they didn't have the budget to do what we are capable of doing now," Dinklage says. Because the first "Toxic Avenger" did such a great job with its "goopy, sloppy, slimy body-horror transformation," Blair says he was "always very careful" of not following the original too closely. "Embrace the spirit and the vibe but not do a beat-for-beat retelling. If we do another sloppy, goopy version, then it's just going to doom itself to endless comparisons of which is the better sloppy, goopy ride." Yet what comes after is the movie's best magic trick: Instead of Dinklage being under the foam and prosthetics of the heroic Toxie, it's actually British stunt performer Luisa Guerreiro (credited as "the Bod"). She "did 70% of the movie, I did 30% if that," Dinklage says. Blair describes their work as akin to David Prowse and James Earl Jones teaming to create Darth Vader in the original "Star Wars." Dinklage would perform different parts of the character, like how Toxie would hold his mop or how he'd run, and Guerreiro would study all that and mimic those movements during filming. Then Dinklage came in and recorded Toxie's lines. "There's a funny sort of remove from her performance and my voice," he says. Dinklage reveals he "had to get my head around" somebody else wearing Toxie's suit. In a way, he's glad he missed out on all the action scenes: "I don't know if you've been to Bulgaria in the summer, but, whoa, that is a gig. But I did have to overcome that mental challenge and that control freak in me to let that go and trust her. And then, oh, my gosh, did I ever." Just playing a guy like Winston, especially on the heels of the cleverly tenacious Tyrion Lannister in "Game of Thrones," was itself an experience. "I've been cast as very intelligent people and I wouldn't say Winston's not intelligent – it's just his kindness gets the better of him," Dinklage says. "I loved playing somebody who's really trying to do the right thing but stumbling every time out of the gates. Having played Tyrion for a long time, it was nice to relinquish that control of being the brightest, smartest person in the room." This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:'The Toxic Avenger' takes Peter Dinklage back to his teen years
