Everyone’s had a crazy idea, but not everyone suffers the anxiety of seeing if they’ve spent millions of somebody else’s money on that mad scheme. That thought was going through writer/director Macon Blair’s head when he was doing camera tests for the better-work, must-work, has-to-work element of his new movie, The Toxic Avenger. That essential component? The rubber-suit costume of Toxie himself.
Blair leaned back in a booth at the Omelettry in Austin, alongside his wife, Lee Eddy, as he discussed that day just before filming began in Bulgaria in 2021. The suit was being developed right up to the last minute, with animatronics and paint tweaks to be done and redone and re-redone. “We can see Toxie in motion – not just standing around in flat lighting – and suddenly the costume’s on and the cinematographer’s lit it beautifully, and the eyes are moving with the motors, and everything is coming together at the same time, and you go, ‘Oh, shit, it will work.’”
Four years after that camera test and the resultant deep sigh of relief, Blair’s on the eve of the biggest moment in his career. The end of this month will see the release of The Toxic Avenger, a remake of the 1984 microbudget splatterpunk classic from indie legends Troma Entertainment. The mild-mannered protagonist of this gloopy superhero spoof is a janitor, Winston Gooze (Game of Thrones favorite Peter Dinklage), who is transformed into a green-skinned, mop-wielding juggernaut of justice called the Toxic Avenger (voiced by Dinklage, with Luisa Guerreiro in that rubber costume). It’s the big-budget remake no one ever expected, and it’s a dream come true for Blair. “None of this was lost on me,” he said.
So how did this all come to pass? How did a kid from suburban Virginia become an Austin filmmaking mainstay and then travel to Eastern Europe to reboot one of the most beloved cult movies of all time? “Oh, let’s hear this,” said Eddy, as her quesadilla arrives. “I love hearing these things.”
Blair was announced as the director of this reboot in 2019, produced by Legendary (the same studio behind the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy) and Troma. After receiving its world premiere at Fantastic Fest 2023, it now arrives in cinemas on August 29 from Cineverse, the same distributor that broke conventional box office wisdom with the surprise success of another Fantastic Fest selection, Terrifier 3. However, for all the noxious sludge, death by mop, decapitations, disemboweling, butt punches, and weird fluids, Blair makes it clear that Toxie isn’t Art the Clown. “It’s not that kind of gore,” he said. “It’s quite gentle by comparison.”
This may seem like a real change of pace for an artist who as an actor is best known for dark and introspective parts in films like Blue Ruin and Green Room, and as a writer of bleak existential thrillers like Hold the Dark, all made with his lifelong friend, Jeremy Saulnier, who he met in elementary school (“was actually friends with his older sister, and he was in gymnastics with my brother, so we knew each other from car pool”). As a director, he made his debut with a work of mournful whimsy, 2017’s I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, which took the Best Austin Film Award from the Austin Film Critics Association.
However, this is also the actor whose first major role was as a chainsaw-wielding art snob who gets set on fire before falling to his death in another Saulnier movie, 2007’s Murder Party. And the pieces really start fitting together when you remember that Blair studied film at Virginia Commonwealth in Richmond, Virginia – home city of splatter metalers Gwar. “We lived in the Fan District, which in the Nineties was a very punk, artsy neighborhood,“ Blair recalled. “[Gwar lead singer Dave Brockie] lived on our street. We saw him all the time.”
But he was already well on the way to being a Troma kid before that. His first Troma movie? The original The Toxic Avenger. “I was in sixth grade, and my buddy Andy’s older brother Mike had the videotape. It was the older sibling of a friend who’s like, ‘This is the cool music, these are the cool movies,’ the hand-me-downs, and he said, ‘You’ve got to watch this.’” It made an immediate impact on Blair’s young brain. “It was strange and trashy and fun, and it happened to coincide with the time period when we’d gotten our hands on a VHS camera.”
Toxie turned out to be the perfect aspirational hero for a tween who wanted to make his own flicks: “The sense of humor was something we could get down with because we were 12-year-old kids, the violence was very cartoonish, but there was also something very handmade. It had the quality of being made by hands and all the other films we had seen to that time looked like Star Wars – very far away and not something you could do in your backyard. This looked like something you could do in your backyard.”
And even before then he’d learned that films weren’t just this magical vision that appeared on the screen, but something you could make. As a small kid in historic and leafy Alexandria, he’d go to the local library to watch the original Universal Horror movies on 16mm at Halloween. “I was mesmerized,” he said. One year his mom got him a book about makeup master Jack Pierce, the innovative artist who created the unforgettable looks for the antagonists of Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, and more. Before reading it, Blair said, “I was just like, I dunno, you point the camera at something and film it and the movie is done. But the book was all photographs of like, no, you put cheesecloth on their heads and you do this and there’s these processes, and I was like, ‘Oh, shit, these things get built.’”
This is when he started making his first films, as a friend across the street with a 16mm camera taught him how to make stop-motion shorts. When a family friend got that VHS camera, he convinced his old friend Saulnier to come over and do handcrafted effects for the little movies in his backyard, visions of Troma dancing in their heads. Blair said, “[Saulnier] had ideas about how to do squibs and how to do practical effects, and we all joined forces and we spent all of our free time making movies together during junior high and high school.”
Now the path from that wide-eyed kid in a library in Virginia, watching Lon Chaney Jr. turn into a monster, to the filmmaker bringing a cult icon like the Toxic Avenger to the big screen seems like a straight line. However, there were still some detours along the way.
After college, he relocated to New York and reconnected with Saulnier, who had gone there to study film at NYU. “I was working on scripts and going for auditions, and we all had day jobs, of course,” Blair said. “I would be a PA on a TV show or a commercial shoot, Jeremy would be DP, and we’d borrow the camera rig over the weekend and get short ends and 16mm film and beg, borrow, and steal little scraps of things to make our own short films and little projects on the weekend.”
Eddy perked up. “Was Jeremy one of the ones you’d get in trouble with for doing squibs in the street?”
“There would be people laying in the street with blood pouring out of them,” Blair recalled, “and some of the neighbors would know what was going on and think it was funny, and others were unaware of what was going on and we’d get the police called on us.”
Finally, the pair decided to jump into features with Blue Ruin. Written and directed by Saulnier, starring Blair as a homeless man on a revenge spree, it was paid for through a combination of a Kickstarter campaign and Saulnier mortgaging his house and maxing out his credit cards. If it failed, it was all over for them. Instead, it became one of the most critically lauded films of 2013, winning the International Federation of Film Critics award at the Cannes Film Festival and a nomination for the John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards. The backyard VHS kids had gone legit, and Blair was eager to take advantage of this, using the access the awards suddenly gave him. “I was happy to have any conversation,” he said. “If I throw enough spaghetti at the wall then most of it will bloom and land on a plate and transform into a castle.”
Those Brooklyn days were also when his personal life flourished, having started a family with Eddy. But the seeds of his next big change were being sown: a move to Austin. Louisiana native Eddy had already lived here for many years, making a name as a comedian and actor, and as a talent for Rooster Teeth on shows like Red vs. Blue, and scoring four Austin Chronicle Best of Austin wins for acting along the way. She and Blair even worked together on an Austin-made film, 2006’s Gretchen, and that was the beginning of something deeper. “We didn’t know it at the time,” Eddy said. “We were pen pals. We were Friendsters.”
Fast forward to 2014, “and as good as Brooklyn had been to us,” Blair said, “it became clear that it was going to be tough on a financial and space level to make it work for us.” With Lee’s strong community links, Austin became their destination. “Topographically, it was a change and the layout of the city was a change, but knowing a network of people where everyone’s trying to do their thing and everyone will pitch in on one another’s projects, and you get to know people because you meet them on one set and recognize them on another, and there’s not a formal production hub of big studios, and so it’s very self-starting and self-initiating, that part felt very familiar. People trying to do their own things and on their own terms.”
So it’s not like Blair ever planned to make a Troma movie. Then again, he hadn’t expected to direct his first film when he did, but the chance came when Anish Savjani and Neil Kopp of filmscience, the producers behind Blue Ruin, asked him if he had a script he wanted to shoot. Same situation with Toxie: When the opportunity arrived to revamp one of his favorite franchises, he jumped. His logic was simple: “If we could go back to that time of being 12 years old and making movies with your friends, but with the machinery of a Hollywood studio behind you, and actual craftspeople and actual actors, then that would be a lot of fun.”
Legendary and Troma started soliciting pitches in 2019, and Blair quickly threw his hat in the ring. After all, he said, many of his unproduced spec scripts “played blood and guts for comedy, and all of a sudden they’re talking about doing a new version of Toxie and that’s like what I’ve been trying to do all this time.”
Yet Blair was very aware that not only was he pitching on a beloved and unique franchise, he was stepping in the shoes of a cinematic giant. Well, more a home video leviathan. Lloyd Kaufman co-directed the original The Toxic Avenger under the pseudonym Samuel Weil, and it was that film that turned his studio, Troma Entertainment, into a true indie success that to this day remains a thumb in the eye of the established film business. Like Blair, community is everything to Kaufman, and his ragtag little studio has become famous for its traveling carnival feel, where like-minded souls turn minimal budgets into magic. At the same time, it’s been the launching pad for the careers of many familiar figures in Hollywood and provided others with an early platform, including Trey Parker and Matt Stone (Cannibal! The Musical), James Gunn (Tromeo and Juliet), JJ Abrams (Nightbeast), and Kevin Costner (Sizzle Beach U.S.A.). While he was eager to be in contention to bring new life into Toxie, Blair wasn’t holding his breath. “Every step of the way was always, ‘This will be the end of it.’”
He didn’t even really have a story pitch, “just ideas about tone and what the vibe of a potential reimagining could be,” and that vibe was very simple: “Man in suit. Rated R, with the violence played for comedy as opposed to played for terror. And people talk about the silliness of Toxic Avenger, the original, a lot, but at some level there’s kind of a sweetness to it. Maybe it’s the handmade charm of it, but I wanted to preserve all those things, and not have it be dark and gritty, and not have it be slick and polished.”
It also had to be suitably over the top, to retain that absurdist sweet spot that made the original films so distinctive. Take his favorite kill from the original. “It’s the one where Toxie flips the bad guy over into the trash can so his legs are like a Y-shape, and he just does a piston punch on his crotch for five minutes. It’s probably shorter than that, but in my memory it just goes on and on and on and on, and I’m watching it and going, ‘Oh my god, he’s still going.’”
His expectation was that the studio would want something safer than his OTT pitch, something more PG-13, and so he was surprised when they called back asking for plot ideas, “so I give them some story stuff, but they’re probably not gonna like this, and they call back and go, ‘Actually, we like that, let’s get a little more detail,’ and it goes to an outline and eventually that goes to an offer to write the script. I go, ‘That’s great, I’ll write the script.’ Obviously it’s not going to get made, but it will be a nice job in the meantime, and then they liked the script and they said, ‘Let’s try to figure out financing and casting.’”
And this was the point at which he got to meet and work with Lloyd Kaufman, the man that started it all. And, as has happened so often in Blair’s career, what he found was a true, giving collaborator. Blair recalled, “Before anything was written and certainly before we knew we were going to make it, Lloyd said, ‘My intention is to stay out of your way and you can do whatever you want.’ I was like, ‘Look, if you have input, I want that. I want you to feel heard and respected. This is your baby and I feel like a guest in your universe.’ But to his word, he really did stay out of it. He would send texts all the time, words of encouragement – ‘How’s it going?’ ‘Keep it up!’ – but it was never in a micromanage-y kind of way.”
Still, even with Kaufman’s blessing, Blair had difficulty believing this was all real. “Up until the point when I was getting on a plane to go to Bulgaria to actually go and shoot it, I was under the assumption that the plug would be pulled at any moment.”
But in 2021, off to Bulgaria he went, just after another Austin indie filmmaker, David Blue Garcia, had wrapped his big studio debut for Legendary, 2022’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, at the same studios in Sofia. In fact, they used the same sets, so Leatherface’s Harlow, Texas, and Toxie’s Tromaville, N.J., are the same place. “It’s been totally reskinned and there’s different storefronts and paint jobs and extras,” Blair said, “but some of the awnings and stuff, you might recognize.”
Much like Garcia’s experience, this marked a real leap in scale for Blair as a director. “It’s definitely bigger than your backyard,” said Eddy.
Blair nodded. “For Legendary, it was very small. For them, it was a teeny movie, but for me it was gargantuan. … It felt like, at any moment, someone would extend a hook from offstage. There was a misprint and the wrong guy had ended up here.” Luckily, the bulk of the Bulgarian crew goes from film to film together, working as a well-oiled unit, able to turn an empty space into a screen-ready mad scientist’s laboratory in a day. “They were tight as hell,” Blair said. “All that needed to happen was that they needed someone saying, ‘This is what we want and this is how we want it to look, and this is how we want it to feel,’ and it would get done.”
It’s the kind of entrée to the world of studio movies that every director dreams about but so few ever achieve, and Blair isn’t taking any of it for granted. “There would be moments where I would look at these extensive sets that had been built, and they would be filled with people like Kevin Bacon and Elijah Wood, and I would be texting my buddy Jeremy, ‘It feels like I got to make one of the movies we made in high school but with actual actors and actual toys.’”
However, one of the greatest parts of the experience was getting to bring Kaufman, the man that started it all, on to the set and let him see Toxie become a Hollywood A-lister. Blair glowed with happiness. “It was really sweet and special to see Lloyd come out there and see the sets and meet the actors and see it come full circle.”
This article appears in August 15 • 2025.
