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Not a bad job if you can get it,” director Sam Raimi interjects after a dripping-wet Kirsten Dunst delivers her line. She then approaches an upside-down Tobey Maguire, who, as Spider-Man, is in head-to-toe red, black, and blue. With principal photography long since wrapped, Raimi, huddled next to editor Bob Murawski, observes the two actors on several monitors in a dark editing bay on the Sony lot. Raimi is preparing for a meeting with his visual-effects team, but he can’t help taking a moment to admire the good fortune of his lead actor. “At this point in the movie, Spidey is like a misunderstood teenager. He’s a misunderstood superhero—he’s feeling bad,” Raimi says, watching the flickering image on the screen. “One of the effects that Kirsten—I mean MJ [Mary Jane]—has on Spider-Man is that she lifts his spirits.” Apparently. The scantily clad Dunst peels the costume down Maguire’s face, revealing his mouth, and she proceeds to give him a ravishing kiss. “You see why I cast him,” Raimi says. “It had to be someone I could identify with. The story [of Spider-Man] is, ‘What if one of us became a superhero?’” Tobey Maguire is an unlikely summer blockbuster hero if there ever was one. But he has always been a confounding bundle of contradictions: an actor known for his sensitive performances as an often soulful naïf in such meticulously chosen projects as The Ice Storm, The Cider House Rules, and Wonder Boys, but also for running with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Young Hollywood party set, as well as for fiercely guarding his privacy (Autograph Collector magazine dubbed him the “worst signer” in 2001). And now here he is—his generation’s best approximation of Holden Caulfield—taking on a reported $100 million summer tent pole. But Spider-Man was never your holier-than-thou superhero. The character, created by Stan Lee at Marvel Comics in 1962, marked a new breed of comic-book protagonist: Superman came from the planet Krypton, and Batman was an aloof millionaire, but Peter Parker was a lower-middle-class orphan from Queens, New York, who wasn’t popular with the girls. During a museum visit, he happened upon a radioactive spider that bit him, giving him arachnidlike powers. This was a hero cut from the cloth of the comic readership itself: awkward adolescents. Marvel’s most popular character would go through various incarnations (see sidebar on page 54) over the decades before finally crawling its way into the motion picture pipeline in the late 1990s. In January 2000, Columbia Pictures made the bold move of picking Raimi—a director who started out in the cult horror genre (Evil Dead II, Army of Darkness) and had recently switched to more dramatic fare (A Simple Plan)—to bring Spider-Man to the screen. Raimi, a lifelong fan of the web-slinger, was hired in part for his fan-friendly sensibility—his being more like that of a Bryan Singer (X-Men) than a Joel Schumacher (Batman & Robin). He was not expected to deliver cookie-cutter confection—and he would start with the casting of his lead. “Spider-Man is not the guy we admire and look up to physically,” Raimi recalls telling Columbia. “He’s the guy we look up to and admire spiritually. A lot of the picture is [him] coming to terms with this strange transformation that he’s going through.” But while a director’s nuanced vision of an intense character may be best realized by a complex actor, a blockbuster lead usually calls for an accessible, pop-friendly celebrity—not exactly what the 26-year-old Maguire embodies. “Tobey’s very closed to people he doesn’t know,” Dunst says of her costar. “He’s always in control.” Still, Raimi had a dramatic vision that he felt only Maguire could fulfill. “If you get in for a close-up with Tobey, there is so much more going on than with a lot of other actors,” Raimi says. “There is a heavier, darker, secret side to him.” Maguire arrives for dinner at the Santa Monica vegetarian restaurant Real Food Daily in a pristine Mercedes S500, and he skips around the car in a blue track suit over a white T-shirt and with a few days’ stubble. The restaurant is an old favorite, but he says he hasn’t been here in a while, though after he orders a sumptuous meal of Salisbury Seitan (a hearty protein derived from wheat), mashed potatoes, stuffing, and gravy, he warmly greets several fashionably unkempt patrons and a waiter. (Waiter: “How are you doing?” Maguire: “Just hanging out. Did you have fun that night?” Waiter: “Yeah, it was a blast. . . . We’re out of the stuffing, though, bro.”) Maguire, a vegetarian for nine years and a yoga practitioner for eight, folds his right leg under himself in a half-crossed contortion and readies himself when a tape recorder is placed on the table. He pretends to go stiff and acts like a robot being turned on. “My initial reaction was one of skepticism of a big studio action movie,” he says of Spider-Man. “Then I heard that Sam was going to be a part of it, and it made me pay more attention. And then I read it, and I liked the script. [Although] there were a few other movies floating around that were possibilities.” Maguire, who refers to potential roles in Gangs of New York, Hart’s War, and what was to become Ethan Hawke’s Oscar-nominated part in Training Day, adds, “I went from being skeptical and chasing all those other films to diving headlong into pursuing getting the role of Spider-Man. It was an effort.” Indeed. First, there was the task of getting the studio to even consider Maguire. “The moment I saw Cider House Rules, I knew I had to have him,” Raimi says. “It then became a question of convincing the studio.” Avi Arad, president and CEO of Marvel Studios and a Spider-Man executive producer, describes the process as “a hard soul-searching, because, well, the name of the movie is Spider-Man. The weight of the movie is on the shoulders of this one actor. People tend to look around because it’s a huge decision.” The names that came up reportedly included Jude Law, Chris O’Donnell, and Freddie Prinze Jr., but Raimi held firm. “They simply believed that we needed a bigger, square-jawed, movie-handsome, but very capable actor in the role. I’m sure they would have been very happy with a Wes Bentley or a Heath Ledger. It was a process of communicating with them. They know who Spider-Man is very well, but they don’t know him [like] a kid who grew up with the books, as I did. The Marvel comic-book artists have always created the visual of Spider-Man as a lithe and slender superhero. He was built more like an acrobat than a muscle man.” Maguire came in for a screen test, but the studio still was not convinced. “They just couldn’t make the leap,” producer Laura Ziskin says. “They loved him as an actor, but they didn’t get it.” So Raimi decided to show the studio what Maguire was capable of in a fully produced, action screen test. “Tobey didn’t want to do it,” Ziskin says. “He’s an established actor.” Being asked to make such a test is often considered insulting to a seasoned actor. But Raimi wouldn’t give up. “I needed him in the movie so badly,” Raimi says. “I said, ‘Tobey, I don’t want to make this movie without you. They’re not going to let me hire you unless they’re convinced by seeing you on film. It’s not about what you or I want.’ We needed to create this tool to convince the powers that be.” The choreographed scene—“all Bruce Lee–style,” according to Maguire—costarred Eliza Dushku, who volunteered as a favor, and was shot by Spider-Man cinematographer Don Burgess. Raimi then spent the night editing the piece and delivered it the next day. “They saw the screen test,” Raimi says, “and they finally said, ‘You know what, Sam? Now we see it the way you do: Thank you for showing us who the character is.’ ” Within hours of Columbia’s decision, Maguire got the conference call from the studio execs, Raimi, and the producers. “We were so excited—as was he. He was thrilled,” Ziskin recalls. “Then we told him he had to start working out three hours a day.” Maguire endured a five-month regimen of working out six days a week, doing gymnastics, martial arts, weight training, high-end cardio, and yoga, as well as eating a high-protein meal four to six times a day. “With the proper training, and with the help of one of Hollywood’s finest wardrobe men, James Acheson,” Raimi says, “we could achieve the look needed for Spider-Man.” As the suit went into development [see sidebar, opposite], the director filled out the cast with Dunst; Rosemary Harris and Cliff Robertson, as Parker’s aunt and uncle; Willem Dafoe as Norman Osborn (a.k.a. the Green Goblin); and James Franco as Norman’s son, Harry. Screenwriter David Koepp’s script would parallel the original Spider-Man saga: Parker’s coping with the responsibilities of a secret identity (“It’s hard to get too close to someone who is hiding a big part of who he is,” Maguire notes) and the powers bestowed upon him, all the while battling his nemesis, the Green Goblin. It wouldn’t be long before the movie’s many fight sequences would test Maguire’s training: In January 2001, the Spider-Man production began. “It was fun, but it was exhausting,” he says. “[Dafoe] was delivering blows to me—kicks and punches. He actually beat me up pretty badly . . . literally.” Not according to Dafoe. “That crybaby,” laughs the veteran actor, who raises the much-speculated-upon issue of just how often it was Maguire in the suit. “Spider-Man has a lot of very gymnastic-type stuff that I don’t think Tobey could learn in the amount of time he had to prepare,” Dafoe says. “I didn’t have to be doubled that much. So sometimes I was fighting with stuntmen.” Raimi is quick to smooth out any possible misconceptions. “Every day we did a Spider-Man thing, you’d have Tobey in the suit. If it was [a scene] where there was any danger, I would try to talk Tobey out of doing the stuff,” says Raimi, who adds that one stand-in broke a leg and another broke his wrist. “But he was very insistent on doing a lot.” According to Raimi, the high-flying acrobatics and wide shots were usually enacted via computer generation (CG) or by stuntmen, and the landings, takeoffs, and dramatic moments were Maguire in the suit. Of course, “dramatic” is often relative. “When he was in the suit, I really didn’t ‘do’ scenes with him,” Dunst says. “I was just usually screaming and he was carrying me.” Which brings us back to just before sunrise, after a full night of shooting, in the early weeks of production, when that kissing-in-the-rain scene was being shot. “I was freezing my ass off in a skimpy little outfit,” she says. “It was also uncomfortable because Tobey and I hadn’t been working together that long.” For one setup, Maguire was out of costume, standing just off-camera, while Raimi was shooting a close-up of Mary Jane as she’s about to kiss Spider-Man. In the take, Dunst was not supposed to actually kiss Maguire, because he was just there for her to react to. “I’m supposed to lean in to kiss him, but really I just lean out [of the frame] and then I come back like I’d just kissed him,” Dunst says. “The first take, I was like, ‘All right, this is gonna suck.’ ” But on the next one, even though Maguire was still off-camera, “I went in and just gave him a kiss,” she says. “He didn’t know I was gonna do it, ’cause if you don’t see the kiss, usually you just don’t do it. It was so good because it really was the first time we kissed. It took a lot of balls. I was embarrassed at first, [but] Tobey told me he was happy I did it because, ya know, it worked.” As for the director, the moment went unnoticed. “It didn’t have the same special magic for me as it did for her, probably,” Raimi says. “I think that’s probably their thing.” With dinner over, Maguire heads to Coffee House, a casual nightspot on Sunset Boulevard that a friend owns, to listen to another buddy play music. The valet drags his finger across his neck, indicating that there is no room in the parking lot, but Maguire pops out of his car and greets the man with his famous Cheshire grin. The valet affectionately shakes Maguire’s hand and waves the car in. Coffee House is hip but subdued, with couples reading by a fireplace. Maguire embraces two below-the-radar actor friends in beards and baseball caps. No Leo. No fawning hotties. There’s been plenty of gossip about Maguire’s personal life, most of it concerning his relationship with DiCaprio: An Internet photo of questionable authenticity showed the two friends sitting in kimonos with magician David Blaine, and Maguire has a tremendous, shall we say, endowment—apparently doctored—exposed in full view. There was also Don’s Plum, a shoestring-budget film made by a then-friend of DiCaprio’s, about the lives of several young Angelenos—over which the producer filed litigation against Maguire and DiCaprio, claiming the two had tried to halt the film’s distribution. And then there’s DiCaprio’s so-called “pussy posse.” “I am sure whoever came up with that term was really pleased with themselves, because it stuck for a little while,” he says. “I don’t get angry. It’s just disgusting, the implications of what that means. It’s very degrading.” Dunst contends that the reputation is unwarranted. “Leo’s been with his girl [model Gisele Bündchen] for two years. Tobey and Leo seem like much older men now. They still are wild,” she says, “but they’ve calmed down.” Actually, most of the recent conjecture centers on Maguire’s relationship with Dunst. Despite reports that they became an item during production (and that they’ve since broken up), Maguire simply says they are “just friends,” and Dunst asserts, “It’s not like he’s my man.” Maguire recoils from any prying into his private life. “I will never talk about who I am dating until I am married,” he says. “I dated a girl for two and a half years and didn’t talk about it.” As for DiCaprio, Maguire would rather focus on his friend’s work. “Leo opened it up for young people in general,” he says. “After Leo did This Boy’s Life and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, it was like, ‘Oh, wow, someone can be young and a good actor.’ ” Similar praise could be bestowed upon Maguire. “He is perceived by the industry as an actor’s actor,” Ziskin says. “Actors really watch him, and [they] are in awe.” Directors aren’t complaining, either. “Tobey is a real talent. Only the best have the quality of believing what they are doing,” says director Ang Lee, who has worked with Maguire twice, on The Ice Storm and Ride With the Devil. “Most actors don’t. They just plan what they want to do. They perform.” Raimi made sure to exploit that talent. “I got a lot of great Tobey performance-time,” he says. “A lot of [his] screen time is spent alone.” One such moment happens after Parker’s uncle has died at the hands of a criminal whom Parker, as Spider-Man, could have caught before the fatal act. “He is consumed with guilt, and his aunt says, ‘This is not the proper way to honor your uncle. He had expectations of the person you could be; now, become that person,’ ” Raimi says. “And she leaves Tobey alone, and I see Tobey think about those words and pull himself out of his self-absorbed guilt and sorrow.” The scene lasts about 35 seconds. It’s the end of the first act of the story, a crucial moment when Parker must grapple with his new powers and responsibility. Tears and all, Maguire nails it, Raimi says. “Maybe it’s because he’s not acting. Or he’s acting, but he’s thinking those real thoughts in that moment. He’s a very soulful person, and he’s very honest about his performances. I think he really doesn’t try and fake things. He tries to feel them.” Maguire downplays the process of becoming Parker by keeping things on the surface. “There’s a physicality to him—he wears glasses and clothes. I bring my shoulders down a little bit and stick my head out,” he says, making the gesture of a dopey, head-sunken kid. “It’s subtle. Stuff you wouldn’t necessarily see.” Sure, but how does he do it? “I prepare a lot,” he says. Prodded for more, he adds, “My teachers believe in using the given circumstances, but if the given circumstances aren’t working, then you should have a tool bag to pull things out of, because if on take 15 the given circumstances aren’t working, what are you going to do? You are going to need a backup.” So, what’s in the tool bag? “I can’t talk about that,” he laughs. “That stuff is personal.” Maguire’s parents—his father was a construction worker and cook, his mother a secretary—separated when he was two years old. He then lived with various combinations of relatives in several homes, mainly in the Los Angeles area. “My relationship with my parents is more as friends than as parents,” he says. “My mom was 18 and my father was 20 when they had me, so I do not feel like I had strong parental figures.” (Perhaps Lee is touching upon that when he notes, “I think Tobey probably has problems with being bossed around or with anyone who shows signs of authority.”) His family was “super-duper poor,” Maguire has said. He attended so many different schools that he went through a period where he would vomit in the morning because of the anxiety of meeting new classmates. But how that led to Maguire becoming one of the best actors of his generation is a navel-gazing exercise he is unwilling to indulge. “I don’t know how that shaped me as an actor,” Maguire says. “Sure, one can speculate.” What’s a matter of record is that at the age of 11, Maguire was considering following his father’s career path by taking a cooking class, but his mother gave him $100 to take an acting workshop instead. After later switching to a professional acting school, Maguire landed bit parts on television and in film (This Boy’s Life, S.F.W.), as well as a new friend, DiCaprio, but his career didn’t take off until a bad haircut got him through the door. In 1995, actor Griffin Dunne was directing a short film, Duke of Groove, for which he had all but cast a young actor, who then came to a call-back with a shaved head. Dunne was appalled—he turned to a list of actors and picked Maguire. “As far as I knew, he was some kid off the street,” says Dunne, who had Maguire read with costar Uma Thurman. “We started shooting a week later.” Groove led to Maguire getting noticed by Ang Lee, who was casting The Ice Storm, the story of a ’70s suburban family coping with the strains of change. “I was very attracted to his soothing, innocent quality,” says Lee, who had Maguire read for him twice. There is a moment in that film that helped sear Maguire’s performance in the minds of audiences—and casting agents—everywhere. It happens toward the end, when Maguire’s character, Paul Hood, travels to New York City to go on a sort-of date with his school crush, played by Katie Holmes. She takes a sleeping pill and passes out, with her head literally falling in Hood’s lap. “Tobey does what is not on the page,” Holmes says of that moment. “That’s what makes him a great actor.” It’s a scene that distills Maguire’s talent. “I like it when I don’t have to say anything and [the camera] just gets in there. There is a lot going through that kid’s mind: ‘God, this is great and a bummer at the same time.’ And, ‘Should I be bad?’ ” He laughs. “But you are not saying anything. It is great to pull that off.” And he does. In fact, it’s an accomplishment that reverberates through the best of his subsequent performances. “Where film is unique is in that close-up, when the audience knows exactly what’s going on because they’re watching the character think, and they know what he’s thinking,” producer Laura Ziskin says. “The really good film actors don’t need dialogue.” Maguire soon landed parts in Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry and Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , before scoring leads in three top-notch dramas: Gary Ross’s Pleasantville, Lee’s Ride With the Devil, and Lasse Hallström’s Cider House Rules. The Pleasantville and Cider roles were similar to his part in Ice Storm—a clever, slightly dorky innocent coming of age—but in the elaborate Civil War drama Devil, Lee guided him to another level of performance. The stark epic centers on the complex relationships between a band of Confederate “bushwhackers” who battle against the Union, nature, and, ultimately, themselves. “I had the pleasure to start [with him] when he was really innocent, in The Ice Storm,” Lee says, “and then to see him grow from that innocence and pick up skills and be able to carry a whole, heavy-duty movie. As a person and as an actor, the innocence is no longer the only thing he has.” Next up was the role of a student prodigy in Wonder Boys, which also stars Storm alum Holmes. “He was more confident,” says Holmes, who acknowledges the challenge of working with Maguire. “He’s very smart and he’s very precise about his work. You have to have your game face on, because you never know what he is going to throw at you. He is constantly thinking.” It’s something Holmes had noticed on the set of The Ice Storm. “Tobey was very much into doing his own thing and doing it his way. I respected him for that,” she says. “When actors initially get into the business, they want to jump into everything. He doesn’t rush. He takes his time.” Why would a guarded, meticulous actor, one who shies away from the invasiveness of the telephone (“It is like an uninvited guest. It’s suddenly there in your room, and you are obligated to take care of it”), walk right into the Spider-Man spotlight? “I really like the story,” he says. And sure, Raimi was a big pull. So was the allure of something new. Dunst has another idea. “Smart career choice,” she says. “He wants to have more control and to produce. Now he’s more studio-friendly.” Dunst sees a businessman at work. “The kid’s blowin’ up. He’s gonna be a major producer.” (His producing debut is Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour.) She adds that she and “even Leo” ask him for career advice. “Tobey loves money,” Dunst adds. “And he’s the smartest with business. He could manage himself.” In effect, he does, despite having a publicist, an agent, and a manager. “I am basically the head of a company,” Maguire says. No small feat for someone who considers himself formally “uneducated,” with the equivalent of a ninth-grade education. For now, Maguire has not committed to any projects other than Spider-Man (he’s signed on for two sequels). “I look forward to moving on from playing kids who are in high school. In four or so years, roles will open up,” he says. “I have cracked the first layer. But there is a shortage of good material. It was easier eight years ago when I just needed the money. With more choices, it makes it more difficult: ‘Shit, what do I do? Who do I want to work with? Am I getting too comfortable?’ ” Lee commends this sort of questioning. “He needs good projects. He has to stay a good actor. He has to work hard,” the director says. “He’s not like the good-looking movie star. He has to stay being a good actor to be around.” Maguire concedes that it’s harder than he imagined. “When I was a kid, I thought, ‘I’ll just beat everyone out by being the better actor,’ ” he says. “And now I realize how impossible it is to get a good role.” Maguire cites a book he once read about castrato singers—the castrated 18th-century sopranos who endured arduous training—as a metaphor. “This [castrato] teacher and his student are in the audience, and the teacher is saying, ‘You see that, that guy has all the talent in the world, but he doesn’t work hard and he’ll never be as good as that guy who doesn’t have half the talent that he has, but he works constantly,’ ” Maguire says. “And then, of course, the real magic comes from the people who have all the talent and work twice as hard.” His sacrifices may not be quite as dramatic as losing his testicles, but Maguire will certainly have to give something of himself to live with his Spider-Man success. But maybe there will be other benefits, as Maguire found wearing the Spider-Man suit. “It took getting used to,” he says. “I’m zipped up completely in the suit, so I am at other people’s mercy, which, I guess, is good practice for me—to not be in control.” There will be other adaptations to come. “There’s the upside and downside of what’s going to happen to him,” Ziskin says. “I think his life is going to change in a big way with this movie.” Last summer, Maguire snuck into a Westwood theater to see the first Spider-Man trailer hit movie screens. “I went in in the dark. There were three trailers—Planet of the Apes, The Lord of the Rings, and Spider-Man. I am pleased to say that we got the most applause,” he says. “It was a good ego moment.” Still, doesn’t it bother him that he works in a world that revolves entirely around how others perceive him? “It’s interesting when there is a really knowing, calculating guy behind the guy who’s talking to you right now,” he laughs. “I’m kidding.” Huh? “There is a guy who is really aware of all the perceptions about him and he’s in control of everything and completely manipulating everything constantly,” Maguire says. “I’m only kidding.” Perhaps. “You’re asking me to give insight into my personality or my philosophy of acting. I just don’t think that deeply about it,” he says. “What it means when I do this or that—I don’t know. That’s coming outside of myself. I prefer to live my life from inside of me, rather than come outside.” Which is why he’d prefer not to shed much light on that great kissing scene with Dunst. “I hate reading things that give insight to the shooting [of a movie],” Maguire says. “I mean, I was upside down in a harness, which is somewhat uncomfortable. We were rushing to get the shot before the sun came up, and water is raining up my face and down my nose.” He’d rather leave it at that. Maguire worked hard on that scene, as he did creating his Peter Parker–Spider-Man persona. The least we could do is leave it to him to decide when—or whether—he removes the mask.
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