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His tenure as Spider-Man has made Tobey Maguire America’s
brainiest action hero. It has also made for widely noted changes in
his physique. But now he’s back in fighting form – and he’s not
pulling any punches.
When you think of Tobey Maguire, you don’t picture abs and pecs.
From his breakout performance in 1997’s The Ice Storm to similarly
nuanced turns in quirkily intelligent films such as Pleasantville,
The Cider House Rules, and Wonder Boys, Maguire, at 5’8”, is slight
of build and unassuming in presence, the kind of actor you associate
with tweed jackets and oxford shirts.
But a funny thing can happen when you’re better known for your
brains than your brawn; a change in physique can spark no end of
media fascination and speculation. Maguire, who embarked on a series
of see-saw-like transformations for consecutive movie projects
started with Spider-Man in 2002, seems understandably exasperated by
the relentless interest in his body. “I’m just kind of a normal kid
who had to get all yoked up for Spider-Man and go from that to
getting superskinny, almost sickly looking, for Seabiscuit and then
back to Spider-Man shape,” he says. “And journalists have five
questions and that’s one of them.” Though many Hollywood stars find
themselves struggling to be taken seriously after being catapulted
to fame by their striking looks, Maguire’s trajectory seems to have
gone the other way. After winning critical acclaim as a first-rate
actor who could convey a character’s entire life history with just a
shift of his eyes, he suddenly found himself ripping off his shirt
in an audition.
“Sam [Spider-Man director Sam Raimi] was like, “Look, you need to
help me cast you,’: Maguire recalls. Sporting a scruffy beard that
lends a wizened quality to his round, almost babyish face, the
32-year-old actor is sitting in his Los Angeles office, Maguire
Entertainment, eating a boxed lunch of rice and veggies. He speaks
enthusiastically of all things Spidey, but reveals a bemused grin
with recounting the casting process.
“I had done an audition tape, but it wasn’t want they wanted to
see,” he says. “They were like, ‘He can act; we knew that. But we
want to see an action scene.’ So I went in wearing a unitard – an
all-blue unitard – but those things compress your muscles. They
don’t make you look good, really. So I ripped the top down and did a
fight scene with my shirt off with stunt doubles. And that’s how
they cast me.”
In many ways, Maguire’s shift from intense cerebral actor to The Guy
Whose Body Everyone Talks About boils down to that strip-teasing
moment. When it comes to sheer athletic prowess, Spider-Man is
notably leaner, meaner, and more agile than his fellow superheroes.
Superman flies, Batman drives, but the “webbed wonder’ is equal
parts gymnast, fighter, and arachnoid wall rappeller.
“I was working out about four or five hours a day,” Maguire says of
his preparations for the first Spider-Man. “I did high-end cardio,
yoga, martial arts. I worked with a gymnastics coach and did
tumbling and climbed ropes. The Spider-Man stuff was pretty specific
and it was a challenge, but I just saw it as going to work.”
Already coping with what he thinks was a herniated disk that was
causing nerve pain in his back, Maguire then went on a
1,200-calorie-a-day diet for Seabiscuit, whittling himself down to
20 pounds below his normal weight, a program that lasted eight
months and that he says, “had me getting faint to the point where I
was dropping to my knees.”
“Tobey did a great job of losing weight,” says his Seabiscuit costar
Jeff Bridges. “He did blow it toward the end of the shoot, though. I
remember him sending his assistant off to gather as much candy as
possible. He sat there with a very serious expression on his face
and ate bowls of it in front of us. He’d had enough of denying
himself. That said, his discipline was something to behold.”
By necessity, that discipline lasted through Spider-Man 2, but once
the film wrapped, Maguire admits he was struggling, which makes what
happened next not all that surprising.
“I was like, “Give me doughnuts!” Maguire says. “Maybe I messed up
my metabolism or something, but I kind of rebounded. I was eating
lots of sugar, and I was out of shape. I guess that went on for a
little over six months.”
Maguire’s bloated appearance during that time generated a level of
cheeky tabloid gossip and blogospheric banter that continues to dog
him. Though by all appearances he was happily coupled with his now
fiancée Jennifer Meyer, Maguire was tarred with monikers such as
Tubby Tobey and “From Spider-Man to Wider-Man.” There was also some
whispers that Maguire’s handlers pulled him from an appearance at
the 2005 Golden Globe Awards (and that he was replaced with the
reliably eye-candyish Orlando Bloom) because he was too overweight
to be seen in public.
Maguire dismisses the Golden Globes rumor as “absurd” and attributes
his unhealthy period to the cumulative effects of calorie
deprivation. “It was kind of gross eating like that,” he says. “But
I felt so much better once I got a handle on it. And when I say
that, I don’t mean I needed to be institutionalized. It’s more like
it took six months to correct what I’d done to my body.”
It’s not every day that you hear a man, especially a famous one,
speaking candidly about the tyranny of hyper-body-consciousness.
Despite a tumultuous childhood that had him bouncing between his
parents (who married after he was born but then soon divorced) and
various relatives around much of California and the Pacific
Northwest – “I went to as many as three or four different schools a
year,” he says – he was a good student and made friends easily. When
he was 12, Maguire’s mom, Wendy Brown, now an aspiring screenwriter,
offered him $100 to take drama in school instead of home economics,
and pretty soon he had a manager and was doing commercials and
appearing on television shows like Blossom and Roseanne. It was also
around this time that he started developing his own ideas about
things (for instance, telling his parents in no uncertain terms that
he was dropping out of school in the ninth grade), including the
hypocrisies of the image-making machine.
“I was an angry kid when I was starting out,” Maguire says. “I was
like, “Oh, if I ever go to the Academy Awards, I’m gonna wear shorts
and a T-shirt because who are they to tell me what to wear?’ And I
thought that if I ever did magazines, I’d just look the way I really
looked, even if I had pimples. Of course, the problem with that is
you’re doing a disservice to your career. And they just airbrush
them now anyway, even though you may be representing more of what a
normal kid looks like and not creating these ideals that are
impossible because people don’t have airbrushes in the morning
before they go to school, you know? So that part of it frustrates
me.”
Maguire, who speaks in thoughtful animated fragments that call to
mind the Gen-X version of the Holden Caulfield types he played
before Spider-Man, tends to refer to himself as a kid. But he has a
kid of his own now, a daughter Ruby, who was born last November to
Meyer, a jewelry designer whose heart-shape locket is worn by Peter
Parker’s love interest, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), in
Spider-Man 3. And though he remains mum about his personal life (he
won’t comment on wedding date and laughs coyly as he hides a
personal message scrawled in magic marker on his takeout box), the
subject of the perverse fishbowl of Hollywood can prompt him to get
on a soapbox.
“Here’s the thing – and this won’t make it into your article,”
Maguire says with a knowing smirk. “But a lot of these magazines are
very damaging. It doesn’t just affect woman; it affects all of us.
You can look at a magazine and go, “Wow, she’s hot. I want a chick
like her.’ So that’s the expectation. If your whole thing is about
your body and you’re anxiety-ridden, it’s not worth it. And maybe
you’re relying on your looks too much. If you’re too good-looking
and things come too easily, you won’t work as hard.”
And what about the fact that his daughter is growing up in L.A., the
locus of body obsession?
“I’m way not into sugar for kids,” Maguire says. “Like, big time.
But you don’t want your kid to be the carrot kid. You know, there’s
always the kid at the birthday parties carrying a bag of carrots.
You’ve got to let them eat a little cake.”
© Meghan Daum, Elle magazine |
