|
InsomniacFreak thanks Catherine at Sur La
Toile for allowing MMC to borrow this pre-typed text so InsomniacFreak
wouldn't have to retype it. The article is
copyrighted to Interview Magazine and the above referenced author/publication with all rights reserved.
No copyright infringement is intended.
Ingrid Sischy dedicates this article to Destiny
Actor Tobey Maguire may be a round peg in a square hole when
it comes to fitting Hollywood's idea of leading man material, but
the life he's led so far has given him the kind of believable
qualities no one can manufacture. Watch out - he's going to be big
INGRID SISCHY: Here we go, Tobey. Let's start at the beginning:
Where were you born?
TOBEY MAGUIRE: I was born in L.A. Growing up, I bounced around a lot
- Palm Springs; Ashland [Ore.]; Vancouver; Washington State. My
mother was eighteen and my father was twenty when they had me. They
got married when I was two, and I think they got divorced when I was
two as well, so they would move around separately. My father already
had a kid from when he was seventeen. I'm twenty-three now and he
had two kids at that point. I can't even imagine that.
IS: How many siblings do you have?
TM: I have four half brothers. But I grew up as an only child,
pretty much.
IS: Which of your parents raised you, or did they both raise you?
TM: I've lived with my more by herself, my mom and her boyfriend, my
aunt, my grandma. I've lived with my dad alone, my dad and a
stepmother, my dad and his brother, my dad and his mom.
IS: How did your mother support you both when you lived with her?
TM: She worked a lot of different jobs. Office work, mostly. Looking
back, if anything was her career, it was her children. That's what's
she's given her life to and it's a big burden. Part of me is
grateful and part of me is resentful because I want to see her have
her own life. On the other hand, what's wrong with someone's passion
being their children?
IS: Were you poor while you were growing up?
TM: We were super-duper poor.
IS: Did you feel that your mother worried about not being able to
get you things?
TM: I needed braces when I was a kid but they were too expensive. My
more would still get me these crazy gifts, though. On Christmas or
my birthday she would get me something completely beyond our means.
She got me a keyboard piano one year, a nice one, even though she
couldn't afford it. IS: It sounds like your mother wanted you to
have creative dreams, and maybe try to achieve them.
TM: I don't know what her plan was for me then, but she wanted me to
have a taste of things that maybe she wanted to do and never got to.
She was always getting me into things like break dancing. When I was
eight we'd go to this Saturday market in Portland [Ore.], where me
and this other kid would do backspins and little routines and put
out our hats and get money. I also took piano and ballet lessons,
though I never followed through with anything for too long.
IS When did acting start to become a big part of your life?
TM:: When I was eleven and I was living with my uncle and my father
in Palm Springs, I had an elective class. My father's a cook and my
grandmother taught culinary arts and I love cooking, so I was going
to take home economics. But my mother gave me a hundred dollars to
take drama. At the time it was a gigantic sum of money. So I took
drama.
IS: Was living in Palm Springs a happy time in your life?
TM: The first month I moved there, I threw up every single morning,
as if I were pregnant. I was a kid going through a lot of stress
about being at a new school again. I'd been to so many different
schools, I never had a friend for more than a year. In fact, I was
in Palm Springs for about a year and a half and made pretty solid
friends again, and then, midway through seventh grade - boom! - I
had to move again. I went back to L.A. to live with my mother, and
she told me that I had to make a choice for eighth grade.
IS: What kind of choice?
TM: I could go to a professional school and focus on acting or go to
a regular school and focus on school. So I chose the professional
school. In ninth grade I did a play for a third of the year, and the
tenth grade was home study. I eventually got my high school
equivalency but as far as I'm concerned I have a ninth-grade
education and not a great one. And I had been a great student up to
seventh grade.
IS: So you have a disconnected relationship with education?
TM: Yeah. I wanted some stability but because of all the moving
around, it wasn't there. Having to go meet new kids for like the
twelfth time was too much - I couldn't take it. I became really
rascally around that time and ditched school a lot. My morn and I
would get into huge fights, where she would beg me to go to school.
She would threaten me with truant officers and I would say, "Go
ahead, Mom. Here's the phone. Do you want me to dial the number?" I
knew in the end she wouldn't have the heart to do it. Anyway, around
that tenth-grade year, I started to read acting books and I'd do one
play and then another and I became really interested in acting. Part
of it was that I was always a big fan of movies and had a real
respect for actors.
IS: Did you go to a lot of movies when you were a little kid?
TM: Yeah. When I lived with my dad, my morn would come and pick me
up and the weekend would consist of going to eat somewhere and going
to see a movie, and sometimes we'd sneak from one to the next. I
liked every movie I saw in those days.
IS: So at some point the pleasure those experiences gave you must
have fed into your feeling that you could be the one up on the
screen?
TM: Uh-huh, and once I began acting and I'd been in it for a year or
two, I decided I really wanted to succeed. I was doing a first
rehearsal of a play in L.A. one time when I was sixteen and I
remember I was pretty much scared out of my mind. But when the
director asked me to get up and sing, because I'm a terrible singer
I decided the only way to get through it was to take the room. That
was quite a breakthrough for me.
IS: Was that the first time you'd ever taken a room?
TM: No, no. As a kid I was always kind of a nut, you know? [laughs]
I remember when I was four years old I sang "Zippity Doo Dab" at a
local talent show. I've always liked to embarrass people, and on
that occasion, when I was onstage singing, I said, "My mom is in the
audience and she's right there, everybody. Look!"
IS: One of the first movies you did, when you were around sixteen,
was This Boy's Life [1993]. How did that come about?
TM: Around the time I was auditioning for that I was developing a
taste for movies from the '70s with Hoffman and De Niro and Pacino
and Nicholson. I thought anything else was utter horseshit. And then
suddenly I was one of ten kids or so reading with De Niro for the
main kid part in This Boy's Life. I was terrified. I think I did a
really poor job with the audition. Leo [DiCaprio] got the part, of
course, but I was given a tiny role in the film. It was like the
first respectable gig I'd gotten.
IS: This whole generation of new young stars is an interesting
subject. So many came from L.A., and so many started off as kid
actors going around to audition.
TM: They should make some weird documentary on kids auditioning.
Whether they come from out of town or whether they live in L.A., the
pressure that's put on them can be such twisted shit. I knew a
nine-year-old girl who didn't get a job after six weeks, and she
said, "I was happy to go home, but I was sad because everyone got a
job and I didn't ..."
IS: It's a little like child labor. There's a difference with kids
who know what they want, who have a dream to be in pictures, but the
ones who get pulled around because of someone else's ambitions
always remind me of those turn-of-the-century photographs by Lewis
Hine, which documented the cruelty of kids being put to work in
factories. He had to disguise his camera to get those pictures. In
the entertainment business it's all out in the open, and it even
looks glamorous. But if it's not what someone wants, it's a whole
other story. Anyway, you obviously started to want it. Tell me your
sense of why.
TM: Acting gives you a sense of community and that drew me to it.
You go around and see these same kids at auditions, and even though
there's some weird competition going on, there's also some
continuity. So Leo and I were friends, and going into read for This
Boy's Life we said to each other, "No hard feelings if the other one
gets the big part, and whoever gets it will help the other person
get a part in the movie." I was really excited when Leo got the part
and I was excited to be in the movie myself. It was really cool
doing it, because Leo knew what a crazy fan I was of De Niro's. I
remember being in L.A. when Leo was up in Canada starting rehearsal.
I got home one day and checked my machine and it said, "Hey, Tobe,
it's Leo. What's up, man? I'm just cruisin' around up here in Bob's
car." He goes, "Hold on, someone wants to say hi." And Robert De
Niro gets on my machine and goes, "Hey, Tobey, how ya doin'? Lookin'
forward to getting you up here. Take good care of your buddy Leo."
Then Leo got on and he was like, "Hey, I'll talk to you later."
Click. This was unreal to me.
IS: You were obviously doing something right to land the part you
did. Do you think that's partly to do with drive?
TM: There was a point where I snapped into this real aggressive
fervor, this clawing to achieve what I wanted. I've relaxed a little
bit, but for a while I was going nuts. When I lived with my father
and uncle, I'd help my uncle around the house and in the garage, and
I became really efficient at that because I was kind of afraid. He
was a real controlling perfectionist, and partly as a result I'm a
perfectionist, too. I'm really hard on myself and I'm hard on others
who are close to me. I just start seeing all the flaws in myself and
even in my mother, who I love and who I think has done really well
with her life. This is the side of myself I don't like so much. Half
the time I'm heating myself up and half the time I'm going, Relax,
it's OK. The idea is not to be a perfectionist but to be aware of
your shit and work on it. So I try to allow myself to make mistakes.
But at the same time, I still have this motivation to be successful.
Anyway, by the time I was sixteen, I felt I had so much inside me.
I've always known that I have a really powerful spirit and that in
life you can have almost anything you want. But you have to be ready
to do the things you want to do. In that respect, watching Leo was
great for me because he's really good and I respect him as an actor.
And also the fact that his success has opened up tons of parts for
guys my age. He's almost singlehandedly caused this whole youth
thing to explode. Obviously there were kids before him like River
Phoenix, but Leo's the pioneer of it right now and I have him to
thank in a large way. Our relationship has gone through some weird
turns because success has been so extreme for both of us, especially
for him. He had a different family life from mine but he was also
really poor growing up. I used to drive by his house and as I was
pulling up I would watch the blue glow coming from his room. He was
this little tiny blond kid playing video games. And something else
we shared in common at that age was that we hated being
underestimated because we were young.
In a way, as actors, we are all really selfish and on our own driven
paths. But, at the same time, we are all supportive of each other
and not that jealous. My actor friends are some of the most
phenomenal people I have ever met. For Leo and me, it goes back to
those auditions we used to go on together and to wishing each other
well when we went up for This Boy's Life.
IS: What came next for you after that movie?
TM: For a while I did fairly well. I started to make money and get
more important jobs, but at the same time I started to become less
hungry. I became more interested in partying. I was into it for the
social aspect, but in reality I wasn't participating when all my
friends were dancing and having fun and talking to girls. I was just
like a piece of furniture. From seventeen to nineteen I went into
some weird, weird place. I was constantly quiet. I was really shy
and insecure with girls. I had absolutely no confidence. I became
bitter and sarcastic. All my friends called me an old man 'cause I
liked to play golf and smoke cigarettes. Around nineteen I went up
for this film, Empire Records [1995]. The director [Allan Moyle]
loved me. He said, "This is my hip-pocket kid - I don't know where
to put him yet but he's definitely gonna be one of the leads." But
when I went into read for the film I wasn't prepared and I sabotaged
my chance of getting a big part. I disappointed Allan and I
disappointed myself, but my agent got me a small part in the film.
The way it turned out, that movie symbolized a lot of the shit I was
into at the time - youth and music and taking control of my life. I
don't know if destiny is exactly an accurate way to describe it, but
the experience was a lot about change.
IS: It sounds like a big change.
TM: I'll tell you. I went out to the set in North Carolina and it
was like a party scene. The rest of the cast had been working
together for a month or so, and I again felt like this extreme
outsider, desperate to fit in. I was really uncomfortable. I was
going to extremes. I didn't want to use my dry, sarcastic, cutting
humor anymore; I wanted to have really honest communication, but I
just couldn't find my spot. There was a real sadness for me at the
time.
IS: What happened?
TM: Well, I had a kind of semi-breakdown. I thought about my life in
the past and my relationship with my father in particular. I decided
that I needed to quit the movie and go home to L.A. to live with my
room. Not worry about acting for six months. I had read a little bit
of The Celestine Prophecy, about how there are no accidents, and I
was thinking that everything was happening on purpose. I went to
Allan and asked to be let go. He was very understanding and one of
the things he said to me was, "I want you to write a script for me,
and I want it to be about you and a friend. You're the more
intellectual and introverted guy, and your friend is more outgoing.
I want it to be about how you guys find the middle ground of
communication." And this exactly paralleled my relationships with
some of my friends. He said, "Here's a good title: There Are No
Accidents." It echoed in my head and I just freaked out. Then he
said, "Here's a better title: Make It Stop."
IS: What did you do?
TM: I went back to L.A. I was kind of lost for a couple of days. I
was calling therapists, trying to get some help. I talked to a
friend of mine, telling him about needing a spiritual shift in my
life, needing to have control again, and he's like, "That sounds
great. But it's not about having control of your life again. It's
about letting go of that." He suggested I talk to this mutual friend
of ours who was going through some similar stuff. I called the guy
and said, "I need help. I'm lost."
IS: And the guy helped you get help?
TM: Yeah. And I found these guys who ended up being my roommates for
the next year and a half, which was a great growing environment. For
the next year, none of the exterior things in life mattered to me
anymore. I quit acting for a while and told my agent I didn't want
to go an any auditions. Then all the inner work started paying off
externally.
IS: In what ways specifically?
TM: Things started to turn around and I began to participate in life
and, no matter how much fear I had about being judged, I would get
out there and dance a bit at parties and start talking to people,
even though I was almost trembling at times. It became like a
personal triumph to walk through fear like that. And what happened
was that I started getting good work and girls began paying
attention to me. I got a little bit lost in that. Because ...
IS: You're human.
TM: I'm human and I was getting to taste this stuff I desired for so
long, but only through letting go of it, you know? I've been
straggling ever since with that. Trying to find a good balance.
Because the external success just keeps growing. It's now on its own
course. I don't control it.
IS: As you got on your feet again which movies came about first?
TM: The start of it was a short film I did called The Duke of Groove
[1995]. It was with Kate Capshaw and Uma Thurman and it ended up
being nominated for an Oscar for Best Short. Kate was amazingly
supportive. I remember telling her about my life one day,
semi-complaining. She says, "Tobey, would you really change one
thing? Because all those things led you up to who you are now." And
I had to admit she was right.
IS: Was The Ice Storm [1997] an important one for you?
TM: Yes. It was the first feature where I had a significant part
with great players, a major director, Ang Lee, and a great
screenplay. It was also about something I could relate to - I wasn't
living it at that moment but it was close enough that I could still
feel it and at the same time bring some humor to it. I played Paul,
a kid who's growing up in a family that was falling apart and needed
a tragedy to bring it back together. My character is kind of removed
from the family because he goes to boarding school, and he's the one
who makes the right moral decisions supposedly.
IS: Did you feel good about your performance?
TM: Not entirely, but it was great working with people like Kevin
Kline, Sigourney Weaver, and Christina Ricci. It was just what I
needed.
IS: Ang Lee's a great outsider, too, of course.
TM: And so sweet. He's very quiet and the way he moves and speaks is
very soft but demands so much respect. He's very serious about his
work, so it sets the tone for everyone else. I'm really fortunate to
have just shot his next flick, which is a Western called Ride With
the Devil.
IS: I understand that your new movie, Pleasantville, is partly set
In a televised American small town that is perfect to begin with but
goes wrong when real life starts seeping in. Since The Truman Show
tapped Into a similar consciousness it makes me feel that
something's in the air - and maybe it's a recognition that trying to
live in the real world with all Its harsh realities is more truthful
than seeking out utopias that can never exist. So tell me about
Pleasantville in your own words.
TM: Reese Witherspoon and I play a sister and brother who are
complete opposites. Reese's character is only interested in boys and
her social status. My character's intellectual and not very good
socially. He's obsessed with this '50s TV show called Pleasantville
that's like Father Knows Best or Leave It to Beaver, where
everything is pleasant. Somehow we get zapped back into the
Pleasantville show. I wasn't sure about doing the movie until I
realized what a powerful concept it is.
IS: Did it meet with your expectations?
TM: It was a $40-million movie and I had a lead role, so there was a
lot of pressure on me. To be honest with you, I'm not sure how I
did.
IS: Are you where you want to be right now?
TM: I'm getting there. I have a girlfriend for the first time in my
life, someone I've cared about consistently for a while. She's
showing me that work is not the end of everything. She has good
relations with her family and I use that as an example. I'm becoming
a little bit more relaxed in my relationships and with work. I am
realizing that work is not this sacred freaky thing. I want to be
responsible about it, but it's not the meter for who I am or what my
worth is.
IS: It sounds like you want to be responsible to yourself first.
TM: Yes. And that means I don't want to do four movies a year. I
would prefer to do one film a year and something I've chosen very
carefully. Whatever I do, I should put myself, my heart, my head
into it 100 percent. Because doing a movie is a lot of work, more
than I ever thought it was. But I'm still a kid. I'm growing up and
I want to grow up. But I don't want to miss anything, you know?
© Copyright 1998, Interview Magazine |
