Elijah Wood Is Unrecognizable in 'The Toxic Avenger' Reboot with Peter Dinklage and Kevin Bacon

Elijah Wood's newest role has him as 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 Toxic Avenger, which Entertainment Weekly shared a sneak peek of on Wednesday.

The photo of Wood shows him with dark pieces of hair surrounding a half-balding head, dark eye makeup and blackened teeth.

Blair told EW that Wood's appearance was inspired in part by Riff Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the Danny DeVito Penguin from 1992's Batman Returns "mixed together."

"The look came about by discussions I had with our designers and with Elijah himself," the director added. "I wanted it to feel like a Peter Sellers type of performance where he just goes invisible. The idea is that you forget that it's the Elijah that you know from Lord of the Rings or anything else."

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The original Toxic Avenger starred Mark Torgl as Melvin, a New Jersey–based janitor who, after being pushed into a vat of toxic waste, becomes disfigured and fights against bad guys as a superhero named Toxie.

The film led to three sequels: The Toxic Avenger Part II (1989), The Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie (1989), and Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (2000). The franchise also had a brief animated children's TV show, Toxic Crusaders, a stage musical, a video game and a Marvel comic.

Peter Dinklage is leading the new film as Winston Gooze/The Toxic Avenger. And according to Blair, 48, "Similar to the original Toxic Avenger, he's singularly unqualified to be a hero."

"He's not especially brave, he's not especially crafty, but he has his heart in the right place, and he starts taking it to the limit when he's pushed into a corner," the filmmaker told EW.

"There is a terrible industrial accident that renders him a mutant and an outcast, but also gives him some super strength and super abilities that sets him on a path of being an unlikely vigilante in this downward-spiraling society," Blair added.

Aside from Wood and Dinklage, 54, the film also stars Jacob Tremblay, Taylour Paige, Julia Davis, Jonny Coyne and Kevin Bacon.

Bacon, 65, plays Fritz's brother Bob Garbinger, who is "kind of a henchman at this corrupt company" and seen as a "golden god," as opposed to Wood's "runt of the family" character.

As Blair told EW, Bob is in "the mold of Lex Luthor, where they have all this money and resources at their disposal, but he's just kind of a disaster."

The Toxic Avenger makes its world premiere on Thursday at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas.