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Having just dismounted 'Seabiscuit,' Tobey Maguire swings back into
action in the Spidey sequel.
Our hero, Tobey Maguire, is between movies. He's just wrapped the
already Oscar-hyped horseracing biopic "Seabiscuit" and is about to
don the familiar red-and-blue suit for the next installment of the
"Spider-Man" franchise, "The Amazing Spider-Man."
Maguire is also between categories. In the past year he's risen from
the $4 million he made for Spidey I, to the $12.5 million he made
for "Seabiscuit," to the reported $17 million he'll be making for
Spidey II. All of which means that sometime in the near future he
could join the ranks of Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, Denzel
Washington, Mel Gibson and a few select others and become a $20
million man. But how did this happen? How is it that this gentle,
soft-spoken actor became young Hollywood's reigning, post-9/11
cinematic hero?
He is, after all, not cut from that cloth. At 27, standing 5-feet-8,
with a slight frame and a permanent muss to his hair, his most
heroic pre-Spidey moment may have been his turn in "Pleasantville,"
as a kid so powerful that it takes him nearly two hours to save
uptight, middle-class, middle America from the deadly perils of
black-and-white. But a hero? This is Tobey Maguire we're talking
about - yoga practitioner, ardent vegetarian, squeaky-clean sober
non-party animal. For Christ's sake.
And this is America. Over the past three decades our idols have gone
from gruff, manly malcontents (Steve McQueen, Harrison Ford) to
over-the-top chiseled champions (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Russell
Crowe) and in the middle we had multitudinous variations, but none
of them like Maguire.
But, then again, as "Spider-Man" creator Stan Lee points out, "My
Spider-Man was not your normal hero. He had all kinds of non-heroic
problems: acne, dandruff, school work. Readers could empathize with
Spider-Man. He wasn't impervious to everything like Superman and he
wasn't a millionaire like Batman. He was just a troubled teen.
Tobey's a fellow who won't stand out in a crowd. He's easy to
identify with. Spider-Man is lonesome and troubled and if Tom Cruise
had played him, it wouldn't have been believable."
Maguire was far more than believable. "Spider-Man" opened to a
$114.8 million record-smashing weekend and went on to make more than
$800 million worldwide. It is the ninth highest grossing film of all
time at the worldwide box office.
While this turn of events was unlikely, it's made even more so by
Maguire's troubled past. His rough ride has been well-documented by
now, but the greatest hits are worth recounting: born to parents way
too young to be parents; a divorce and a broken home; a wildly
itinerant childhood that had him uprooted upward of a gazillion
times; a bad spate of adolescent truancy; a mother who paid him $100
to take an acting class in a last-ditch effort to save her son; some
early Hollywood success, which led to some excessive partying, which
led to a self-described "near-nervous breakdown," which led to no
drinking, no partying, yoga; a run of good luck that landed him good
roles; a long, mildly demeaning battle to persuade Sony that he was
really Spidey; and then, finally, stardom.
Which should have been where the story ends, but it didn't. Most
recently, Maguire fought another battle to keep the role of Peter
Parker and his alter-ego, Spider-Man, in the franchise's highly
anticipated sequel - a fight about which Maguire won't comment, but
one that either involved a bad back or a big backend or both. Once
again, Maguire had to don the costume and hang from the wires and
prove that he was ship-shape and still worthy. And, sorry Jake
Gyllenhaal, but the part really is his. Tobey is Spidey. Tobey is
the franchise. Tobey triumphs again.
MEN IN TIGHTS
It's no simple thing to turn a superhero into a superhero. In many
cases, such high-wire choices can quickly become long-fall
catastrophes. Like "Rocketeer" did so much for Billy Campbell's
career. And maybe only the Shadow remembers Alec Baldwin as "The
Shadow." And forget the flops. A quick look at box office numbers
for leading men in successful masked movies and their follow-up
projects says it all. Michael Keaton's "Batman" took in $411
million, but he followed it up with "Pacific Heights," which only
made $45 million. George Clooney's turn as the caped crusader made
$238 million, but his follow up, "The Peacemaker," took in less than
half that. Even if you do hit it out of the park, as Christopher
Reeve did in 1978's "Superman," which grossed $242 million worldwide
(in the '70s, no less), he was far better in "Deathtrap," not that
anyone remembers. Typecast is, after all, typecast.
And Maguire didn't just sign on the dotted line for the first Spidey,
he inked II and III before Sony would even give him the nod.
"That was a big leap for me," says Maguire. "I was committing to
three pictures without having seen the script or met the director -
and those are the two most crucial elements to me. I felt that the
people making the decisions, the people at Sony, were very capable
and that made it easier. And as far as being typecast as a
superhero, I had a career before `Spider-Man.' I was pretty
confident that I would have one afterwards."
The people at Sony were equally trusting of Maguire. "Tobey, to get
the part, considering what we put him through, was very ego-less,"
says Matt Tolmach, exec VP at the studio. "Every decision you make
in a movie is so daunting, but much more so with a franchise. We
never saw this as a one-off. Tobey's role as Peter Parker wasn't
something we could just swap out." As for recent rumors that Maguire
wouldn't be returning in the Spidey sequels, Tolmach will only add,
"We're just thrilled that everything is on track."
CRAFT MAN
Our hero is hard working. His preparation for "Spider-Man" is now
legend: five months of gymnastics, martial arts, weight training and
yoga. The training for his role in Universal's "Seabiscuit" was
shorter, but no less arduous. He lost most of his Spidey mass and
spent long days riding on a mechanical horse and then longer ones on
a real horse, eventually succumbing to the sore back that plagues
most jockeys. But this kind of blue-collar ethic was nothing new.
"I'm very obsessive, I always have been," Maguire says. "When I was
14 and 15, when other kids were out running around, I was home,
alone, poring over early De Niro and Hoffman movies, trying to
figure out how they did what they did."
This devotion to craft also meant a persnicketiness about projects.
The gap between "Spider-Man" and his previous starring role in
"Wonder Boys," spanned two years, which is a long time in the real
world, much less Hollywood. And this is not a new posture.
"I started making choices long before I had the power to do so,"
Maguire says. "Even when I was a kid, I was like that. My agent
would send me a script and I would tell her, `I'm not gonna go read
for that.' She would say, `Why not? You're not in any kind of
position to be this way. Don't you want to work?' But I didn't
believe in it. I didn't want to go to an audition and perform
something I didn't believe in."
Not that Maguire didn't take the occasional rent-paying gig, as his
walk-on on "Walker, Texas Ranger" attests. Still, his career has
been incredibly well managed and most of the credit for that belongs
to him. The list of filmmakers he has worked with - Woody Allen
("Deconstructing Harry"), Ang Lee ("The Ice Storm," "Ride With the
Devil"), Lasse Hallstrom ("The Cider House Rules"), Gary Ross
("Pleasantville," "Seabiscuit"), Curtis Hanson ("Wonder Boys") and
Sam Raimi ("Spider-Man," "The Amazing Spider-Man") - have all, save
for Raimi, been on Oscar's shortlist as directors, writers or
producers.
HORSE LATITUDES
"Tobey has the best chops of any actor of his generation," Ross
says. "He could have cashed in a lot earlier than he did, but he
only wanted to do projects that he loved."
And if that's not compliment enough, when Ross bought the rights to
Laura Hillenbrand's non-fiction bestseller "Seabiscuit," he did so
with Maguire in mind. "I wrote the part of Red Pollard for him,"
Ross says.
He did more than that, too. He happily paid Maguire his post -
"Spider-Man" quote of $12.5 million.
"Seabiscuit" is the story of an undersized racehorse ridden by an
oversized jockey (Red Pollard) who, in 1938, beat out Triple Crown
winner War Admiral at Pimlico racetrack in Baltimore. Both a true
story and a Depression-era fairy tale, it's a hero's tale now as
then. At the time of the actual race, more than 40 million Americans
tuned in via radio for the blow-by-blow. Forty million. If
Spider-Man is a fantasyland hero, then Red Pollard and Seabiscuit
are the same, only this time rendered real.
Based on Maguire's selectiveness, Pollard, like all his previous
roles, was not a random choice. And one of the interesting things
about Maguire's choices - despite the heavy accolades his
performances have received - is that he has not, truthfully, strayed
all that far from home. In each of his films he plays a version of
himself, a kid overcoming a bad past to emerge, ultimately,
victorious.
In "Pleasantville" he's a kid stuck in the past; in "The Ice Storm"
he's just stuck; in "Wonder Boys" he's the aimless college student
with a savant's gift for prose; in "Spider-Man" he's the awkward,
lovelorn teen; and in "Seabiscuit" he's an erring isolationist
riding the most unlikely of long shots. And in the end, all of these
characters prevail.
Maguire has become the poster boy for the troubled teen turned
triumphant man. The protagonist in each of his films takes over
right where the previous one left off - slightly more able to deal
with life, better at responsibility, each victory a bit greater than
the last.
So would Maguire say he's succeeded in real life as he has in
fiction? "I try not to let my past dictate my present," he says."
I'll also say that I certainly don't want to play young, naive kids
anymore. I'm not interested in bumbling around with girls as the
main aspect of my character.
"Look, Peter Parker's a great role and there's some of that to him,
but after these movies I think I'll put that to bed for a while.
Truthfully, it's hard for me to comment on my life, for me to take
myself out of my life and speculate. My life, just like everyone's,
is a gradual unfolding."
A BIG PRODUCTION
Our hero runs a production company out of an office building near
the bent elbow that is Sunset, as the boulevard departs the hectic
crunch of the Strip and heads into the yawning lawns of Beverly
Hills. You could call the building clandestine, if by clandestine
you mean towering and nondescript and so utterly unremarkable that
even an accounting firm might feel anonymous inside. The parking
garage is a maze that Maguire's coworkers describe as the setting
for an early David Fincher film. The office has no nameplate,
nothing to distinguish itself.
Inside, the rooms are lined with beige matting, more straw than
carpet, which complements the sparse furnishings - elegant,
minimalist: tables, chairs and a kitchen with a coffeepot. On the
walls hang framed posters of Maguire's bigger films and one of the
singer Jeff Buckley, maybe as a warning. Buckley himself drowned
young, cut down in his prime, maybe drugs, maybe bum luck, a stark
reminder that even genius answers to fate.
Maguire comes to work in a white T-shirt, a few days' scruff on his
maw, his hair messy. He carries a backpack. He works long hours. He
does not pretend. Ross talks about how often Maguire was willing to
stay on-set and do the off-camera line reads. "He would even stay
and feed lines to day players, to guys who were just in the movie
for one scene."
This level of generosity extends from his first profession as an
actor to his new one as a producer. One of his first major producer
credits was on Spike Lee's "25th Hour" last fall.
"Looking back on it, the whole thing was kind of a miracle," says
David Benioff, who wrote the script and the book on which the movie
was based. "We sent Tobey an unpublished book by an unknown writer,
and he read it. Why? I never asked him that. I'm glad he did,
though. He gave me my career."
Maguire was involved in every aspect of "25th Hour" until he got the
chance to star in "Seabiscuit," which meant he had to drop out as
the lead (replaced by Edward Norton) and only stay on as a producer.
"I was very disappointed when he dropped out of the acting role,"
Benioff says. "I figured the movie was probably dead in the water.
But Tobey remained involved. The movie never would have gotten made
without him."
"25th Hour" is only the beginning of Maguire's producing arc. "Right
now, it's very much as time allows, but I want to be involved at
every level," he says. "I'm just dipping my feet in, but I want to
make some good films. I'm looking for things to develop, both with
me as a producer and an actor."
And will he pay himself the going rate? "Well," he says with a
laugh, "I guess that depends on the project."
© Steven Kotler, VLife / Variety
"QUIET AMERICAN" (photographer Sheryl Nields'
experience with the Tobey Maguire Variety photoshoot)
For Tobey Maguire is living large. Just days after securing, once
and for all, his role as the Amazing Spider-Man, he rolled up to our
photo shoot in a nice (make that very nice) silver S500 Mercedes,
smoking a cigar, a gal-pal in tow. But as soon as he exited his
ride, in a white T-shirt, loose pants and sneakers, he easily could
have passed for one of photographer Sheryl Nields' grips.
That's the thing about Maguire. He's laid back to the point of
disappearing into the walls. The quiet, intense nature of our
photographs doesn't fall too far from how Maguire generally carries
himself.
"Tobey's very layered," says Nields. "Usually there's a lot of fluff
on sets like this, but with him there's no bullshit. We haven't even
scratched the surface of what he's capable of. He's a great artist
and you really feel that when you're around him."
Working together for the first time, Nields and Maguire were like
best friends by day's end. Their chemistry contributed to the jovial
mood felt by everyone on-set. A few of his friends came by for a
visit and played cards. Publicist Kelly Bush brought her toddler,
Ava, who frolicked on the lawns of the magnificent estate that
Nields and shoot producer Joanna Strong had discovered for our
session.
Talk about a diamond in the rough. None of us knew, as we drove
through the surrounding Crenshaw/Pico neighborhood, that the wide,
tree-lined streets of historic Country Club Heights even existed.
The 1913 Tudor mansion was the last detail to fall into place in
what turned out to be a tough shoot to assemble. It was the day
before the Oscars, after all.
But, in the end, all were happy. Everyone piled back into their
cars, a night of pre-Oscar party-hopping on the horizon. |
