"Tobey Maguire:Catch him if you can"

By Daisy Garnett 

SOURCE:  Telegraph.co.uk  (May 31, 2002)

 InsomniacFreak thanks Google News Alerts for bringing this article to her attention.   The article is copyrighted to the above referenced author/publication with all rights reserved.  No copyright infringement is intended.

After years of playing awkward adolescents, Tobey Maguire was nobody's idea of a superhero. But then he slipped into a skin-tight body suit and surprised everyone. Daisy Garnett meets the new spider man


Now, of course, he is famous - on the cover of Time magazine, even - but three weeks before Spider-Man opened in America, when I told people I was going to interview Tobey Maguire, most of them said, 'Tobey who?' Maguire plays the eponymous hero in Spider-Man, the big-deal action movie based on the Marvel comic strip, directed by Sam Raimi and co-starring Kirsten Dunst and Willem Dafoe.

Until Spider-Man, Maguire was known for playing introspective, gawky teenagers - thinkers, rather than doers - in films such as The Wonder Boys, Pleasantville and The Ice Storm. He excelled at depicting the confusion of adolescence, the awkwardness and exhilaration of sexual awakening, and the burden of carting around a complex inner life.

His work was so quiet and understated that Saturday Night Live, America's weekly television sketch show, recently parodied his lack of animation by portraying him as a zombie with a monotone voice and glazed stare. So although Maguire has never received a lukewarm review, he was not exactly the obvious choice to play an action-driven superhero who leaps from building to building while saving the world.

I met Maguire in a quiet coffee shop on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. He arrived by himself, without hoo-ha, publicist or entourage, and if he was recognised, no one let on. In pale blue tracksuit bottoms and an old white T-shirt, he could not have seemed more relaxed or less bothered. He was not shy or awkward. He was pleased with himself and, indeed, why wouldn't he be? - he's a star. In real life Tobey Maguire is far removed from the angst-ridden teenagers he is so good at portraying. He is a rich, handsome vegetarian 26-year-old with all the right answers. And somehow being un-macho, un-earnest and un-ironical got him the part of Spider-Man.

The studio was equally bemused. Maguire? Spider-Man? The two things - at least until the film's opening weekend - didn't seem to tally. Ewan McGregor, Chris Klein, Wes Bentley, Heath Ledger and Maguire's good friend Leonardo DiCaprio were all, apparently, considered for the role, and all seem more appropriate choices, but Raimi knew he wanted Maguire after seeing him in The Cider House Rules in 1999. He just had to persuade Sony. 'They were thinking of somebody who had a sexier public appearance,' explains Raimi about the studio's reluctance to hire Maguire, 'someone who had done successful action films before. It was a healthy reticence on their part. But once they saw the screen test, they understood.'

A screen test? Maguire hadn't done a screen test since 1998. He had starred in an Ang Lee movie, and held his own with Michael Douglas since then. He may not have had as sexy a public appearance as DiCaprio or Brad Pitt, but he has long since enjoyed his own teenage following. 'Yep,' he says, 'I had to do a test. I knew I wanted the part after reading the script, and I was 100 per cent sold after meeting Sam. He told me I was his choice for the film, but it still took me two, maybe three months to get the job. Sam was pretty straight up about the fact that the studio was not particularly excited about me. So, I said, fine, let's just do a test. We shot a scene in an empty room on a video camera. It took the studio two and a half weeks just to see the test, and then they said, this is great, but we need to see something else. We know Tobey can act. We need to see Tobey doing action or Tobey in a suit. Something like that.'

Maguire pauses in his story to order a plate of food. He is a good, unapologetic storyteller. Never once does he stumble or check to see if he is holding my interest. It is as if he is acting and I am his audience, which of course he is and I am. (A little later, when we are talking about getting beyond self-consciousness in order to act and I tell him that I could never do it, he says, 'Yes you could. You're acting right now. You're playing a role and so am I. That's all you've got to do. Only you do it for real.') The arrival of our waitress is a cue for another performance. Maguire practises yoga and is a strict vegetarian. 'Is the lentil soup made with chicken broth?' he asks her. She assures him it is not. 'Are the veggie-burgers made with mushrooms?' (He doesn't eat mushrooms.)

'Yes,' she says, 'they are.'

'What other vegetables do you have?'

'Broccoli and spinach. Zucchini, eggplant, beets.' Maguire doesn't like any of those.

You are a vegetarian and you don't like vegetables, I say, staring at him. He nods unabashed. That must make life... I stop to think of an alternative word for pointless, but Maguire interrupts. 'Challenging,' he says, smiling and raising his eyebrows. He asks the waitress for the lentil soup and a plate of brown rice, 'and throw in some garlic and onions just for fun,' he says, before getting back to his audition story.

'Well,' he continues, 'I was like, "I did a screen test and now they want me to do this other thing. I don't know, Sam, it kind of irritates me that they didn't just ask for that in the first place. It just doesn't make any sense to me, you know. Is this a breakdown in communication or what?" Sam said, "Tobey, listen. You gotta do it 'cos I'm not sure that they will give you the job without you doing it and I need you to do this. Like I don't know exactly where I'm at without you as a partner in this film." Which was flattering. It was nice to know I had his support that way. So I said, "OK, here's the deal. I'll do the thing. I'll do it on Thursday, but I want an answer by Friday. And that's it. That's the only way I'll do it." I was just like, I'm over it. I want to know if I've got the part, so this is how it is.'

Did you do the test in the suit, I ask. It is all I can think of to say, after such a speech - Maguire v The Studio - told with such laconic and knowing playfulness. 'It wasn't the suit,' he says and pauses. 'I did it in a blue unitard.' He looks at me. The story around town, which of course he is aware of, is that Maguire is fabulously well-endowed. Everyone seems to have a friend who has a friend who swears to this, and there is a photograph on the internet of him with DiCaprio and another friend, the magician David Blaine, eating sushi dressed in nothing but undone kimonos. The photograph might well be doctored, but if not, it more than respectfully proves the rumour true. At all events it makes sense. Certainly, he is full of swagger. 'I did a fight scene for the test, and I was in pretty good shape from my yoga, and I hit the gym a couple of times a week. I was small but I was lean. But the problem with a unitard is that it is so tight, it compresses your muscles. You can't see the line of the triceps through the cloth. You could see a good shape on me, but you couldn't see definition. So I unzipped the top of it, tied it off at my waist and did the scene topless. I didn't want to fuck around. So there you go. I just went for it. And it worked out.'

It took 10 years of development (even James Cameron, the director of Titanic, wrote then abandoned a treatment) and $139 million to get the comic-strip hero from the page to the big screen, but it turns out it was worth both the wait and the money. When Spider-Man opened in America it took $114 million on its opening weekend - more than any movie has ever taken in any three days. No movie had even hit the $100-million-in-one-weekend mark before Spider-Man. 'This is a cultural phenomenon,' gasped the box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian. 'Nothing has even come close to this box-office record. The significance of it cannot be overstated.'

Actually, it can. I overstated the film's impact when I asked Maguire, very gently, if he was ready for what was about to hit him. Are you concerned about how Spider-Man, once it hits the cinemas, might change your life, I ask. I had read that Sony and its sister studio, Columbia, are relying on Spider-Man to help them regain their glory days of 1997, the year of Jerry Maguire, Men in Black and $1.3 billion in domestic box-office sales. Plus, Maguire, apologising for being late, has told me that he is run off his feet promoting the film in New York, LA and Japan, just for starters. At the moment, he explains, his time is not his own. And so my question seems a reasonable one. To me. 'Am I concerned?' repeats Maguire. 'Not really.' He has wonderful pale blue eyes, and he is good at using them. He looks right at me and yet I find him difficult to engage. I feel like I can't catch his eye.

You're not worried about being hit with fame, I ask, incredulously. Not even a little anxious...

'No,' he says, as if I am asking him something absurd and outlandish. 'Not really. That's the future. I don't know anything about that.'

Well, you live in LA, you've worked in the film industry for 10 years. You are close friends with Leonardo DiCaprio. You must be able to speculate on what might happen to you.

'No,' he says, shaking his head firmly and giving me a little smile. 'Ultimately the only thing that is happening to me now is that I'm sitting here with you. That's all that's really going on.'

But you are sitting here with me now because I've flown here from London to talk to you about a movie you've made. Right now we are playing the fame game, which is fine, but it does result, on the whole, in fame. It will affect your future.

Maguire interrupts me. 'Will I be alive after this moment?' 'After today?'

Well, of course, who knows? But...

He interrupts again. 'Right,' he says with studied patience, his blue eyes dancing away. 'Who knows? So why even waste our time speculating about the future?'

So you didn't think about the future when you decided to pursue this role? About the prospect of earning $26 million for the two sequels, if this one is a success. About how this would be a certain marker in your career...

'Everything is a certain marker in my career. Every decision I make.'

But some decisions carry more weight than others.

'I don't know if I agree with that. I think so carefully about every decision I make, that I couldn't think any more carefully about this one.'

He has a point there. He has worked with Woody Allen, Lasse Halleström, Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline, Michael Douglas, Michael Caine, Robert Downey Jr and Joan Allen among others. There is not a misguided or grabby choice on his CV.

He started to act when his mother bribed him with $100 to take drama instead of cooking classes (his father, Vincent, was a cook, but his mother, Wendy, who was a secretary, had once wanted to act. The $100 tipped the balance.) He was 11 years old and caught the bug enough to pursue acting with more energy than his schoolwork. He dropped out of high school at 14 - choosing to study at home instead - and began going to endless auditions, which is how he met and made friends with DiCaprio, and every other young actor on the circuit, and every casting director in LA. Two years later, when he discovered the cinema of the Seventies and that he could hold an audience (he was performing in a play at the time), he decided that that was it: he would become a professional actor.

Did you know, back then, that you were going to make it, I ask him.

'Yeah,' he says, 'I knew I could do it if I wanted to do it. I feel like if you can imagine it, then you can do it. Of course, you have also to examine your motivations for doing what you do. Those have to be real.' What were his motivations? 'Well, for one thing, I didn't want to be poor. I grew up poor and I didn't want that.' Maguire's mother was 18 when she had him. His father was 20. They married when he was two and divorced a few months later. He grew up moving between his mother and father, their various new lovers and his aunt, uncle and grandmother. He switched high schools almost every year, and did not appreciate the constant changes, which explains why he dropped out at such a young age. 'Home study,' he explains, 'meant sitting at home staring at pieces of paper and then cheating when it came to the tests. But,' he adds quickly, 'before I withdrew - and that was because of the social aspect of going to yet another new school - I really liked school. I was very good at school. I got good grades. I'm competitive so I like to do well.'

Maguire's competitiveness is well known, and if he was sick of making new friends in high school, he had no lack of them outside. He met DiCaprio at a 1989 audition for a TV show (DiCaprio won the role), but they remained close despite being rivals. A few years down the line, Maguire had his first taste of tabloid fame as a member of DiCaprio's infamous 'pussy posse' - David Blaine, actor Lukas Haas, among others - who went out en masse and partied hard.

Maguire doesn't drink or do drugs, and because he practises yoga and is a vegetarian, he was often pegged as being the odd one out among the group of revellers. But in fact, the fun seemed to be more about access to private jets, VIP rooms and other mega-stars - Robert De Niro, say - than mere booze and cocaine; necessary fuel for some perhaps, but not Maguire. He and his friends play dominoes, poker, backgammon and basketball; they work in the same industry, share managers, agents, wealth and, presumably, an easy shorthand. Plus, the group didn't get its name for nothing. There must have been a lot of pretty and willing girls around, and you don't need to drink or eat meat to enjoy that.

These days, what with DiCaprio away in Rome making Scorsese's Gangs of New York and Maguire busy with the biggest movie of the year, there is less time for such time-consuming get-togethers. The boys are busy acting. 'I like acting, I enjoy it,' he says. 'I'm a huge fan of movies. I like things that can move you; that give you insight. I love the creation of film, the process of it, the whole thing. I wanted to explore all those things. And I thought I could do well at it.'

It didn't take long. At 20 he got his first proper break playing an awkward teenager (of course) in Griffin Dunne's short film, The Duke of Groove. The film, starring Kate Capshaw and Uma Thurman, was nominated for an

Oscar, which meant that everyone in the film industry saw Maguire's performance, including Ang Lee. This led to his first big part as Paul Hood, Joan Allen and Kevin Kline's teenage son, in Lee's film, The Ice Storm. One of the most memorable scenes - and the film has many - is Maguire's. He is sitting on an empty train half reading - coincidentally - a Marvel comic. All he does is read, look up and think. There is a storm outside, and the lights on the train flicker. That's all that happens, but you can't take your eyes off him. He is, for whatever reasons (the stillness of his eyes, his total ease in front of the camera, his lack of ticks), riveting to watch.

He has an equally magnetic presence in Spider-Man. It turns out that Maguire is a brilliant choice. The only tedious moments are when, kitted out in his $100,000 suit (23 were made for the movie, four were stolen), he has to fight his nemesis, an evil and irritating green goblin played by Willem Dafoe. He is completely convincing as Peter Parker, a nerdy, clever teenager in unrequited love with his neighbour, MJ (Kirsten Dunst), the prettiest girl at his high school. (Parker gains his superhuman, spidery powers after being bitten by a genetically altered spider on a school science trip.)

'The strength of Spider-Man is that Peter is a character we identify with as a normal middle-class kid,' Raimi says about choosing Maguire. 'We needed someone who was completely vulnerable and lived with a certain amount of doubt and angst. And Tobey was so grounded and subtle, I simply believed him.' It is so easy to believe Maguire's Parker that it is not hard to buy into his Spider-Man. It is also great to see Maguire, normally so reticent on film, actually do something.

Still, even when he's playing a super-hero Maguire can't seem to escape being cast as the gawky teenager. 'I know,' he says, rolling his eyes. 'I'm kind of old to play a 17-year-old. I'm 26, and haven't had trouble talking to girls in over 12 years.' No kidding. Although he tells me that he is single, three weeks after our interview he is photographed with Nicole Kidman, who is eight years his senior. The pictures show them arm in arm, joshing around early one morning - apparently, the tabloids gushed, after a night of passion; perhaps one of many. Their publicists say they are just friends. And they probably are. He was also, for the record, 'just friends' with co-star Kirsten Dunst on the set of Spider-Man.

All in all, things are going well for Tobey Maguire. If only he were just a little bit more charming, you would be happy for him. He grew up poor and has become rich working hard, doing what he loves to do. His peers have long since respected him and he now has movie-star clout, which he does not seem likely to jeopardise by disappearing into drugs or alcohol. In fact, he seems so much in control of his fate that it comes as no surprise when he tells me that he is about to produce his first film. It is an adaptation of David Benioff's The 25th Hour, an acclaimed New York suspense novel that everyone in the film business wanted to get their hands on. Spike Lee is set to direct. Edward Norton will star. They start shooting any minute now. 'Of course I'm excited about that,' he enthuses. Then, almost without missing a beat, he says, 'I think have to go now', and just as quickly he is gone.

'Spider-Man' opens on June 14