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 "This
might be a good place to stop - I am not tied contractually to any
more Spider-Man movies." Tobey Maguire casually lobs this little
hand-grenade into our conversation. What does he mean, "a good place
to stop"? Tobey Maguire is Spider-Man. He can't stop. Can he?
It's hard to imagine Maguire hanging up the Spandex suit for good.
He's done almost nothing else since he took the role in the first
Spider-Man film in 2002, which kicked off one of the most successful
franchises in Hollywood history. It earned him $17 million for the
second film and a good deal more for number three, not due for
release until spring 2007 and expected to be a genuine blockbuster.
"I am not completely closed to the idea of another one if it made
sense," he admits, when I put it like that, "but I would say the
odds were in favour of this being the last one."
At 31, Maguire is at a crossroads in life, personally and
professionally. Three weeks ago, his girlfriend, Jennifer Meyer,
gave birth to their first child, a girl. He must have been
contemplating fatherhood at least for the past nine months, and at
the same time developing his career in a new direction, as the star
in a high-prestige, black-and-white Second World War thriller called
The Good German.
It doesn't open in the UK until next spring, but its makers are so
convinced by its Oscar potential that they're rushing it out in
America to make the deadline for eligible films. This is the
discerning end of the cinema scale, a far cry from blockbusting
superheroes, and a reminder of Maguire's early promise as a serious
young actor.
He has held on to his smooth-skinned, boyish looks, which only serve
to make him seem all the more earnest, as he makes his serious
points about living a more serious life.
"Generally, teenagers or guys in their twenties don't have families
and aren't deep into their careers, so, now I am in my thirties, I
am looking forward to the kind of roles I can play opening up. They
have already broadened in the past couple of years in terms of the
scripts I have looked at."
He has definitely made the right move with The Good German. Not only
is it timed to earn as many nominations as possible, but with three
Oscar winners - director Steven Soderbergh, George Clooney and Cate
Blanchett - set in postwar Berlin and shot in the style of classic
Forties noir from the heyday of the studio system, it is primed to
get the right attention.
But it's Maguire who steals the show, as Corporal Tully, a GI
assigned to look after a US war correspondent (Clooney) arriving in
Berlin to cover the Potsdam Peace Conference.
At first glance, he is a guileless, sweetnatured kid from the
Midwest - a Peter Parker of sorts. But before long he reveals his
true colours: he's corrupt and foulmouthed, with a penchant for easy
women and crooked schemes. The first time we see Blanchett, she is
enduring rough sex with a particularly aggressive Maguire. A couple
of scenes later, he is beating Clooney up with the same violent
abandon.
Tully is dispatched by a Communist bullet long before the film ends,
but while he's there, Maguire brings an urgent energy. His is the
most compelling character - the others seem a touch dull by
comparison - and is sorely missed once he washes up on the riverbank
at Potsdam. The rest of the film lacks suspense and is more an
experimental conceit than a fully realised movie.
Yet The Good German is a reminder of how good Maguire can be. Not
that he's at all bad as Peter Parker. Just that his earlier work -
in sophisticated films such as Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997), Woody
Allen's Deconstructing Harry (1997), Lasse Hallstrˆm's The Cider
House Rules (1999) and Curtis Hanson's Wonder Boys (2000) - showed
his potential to become one of his generation's best actors. Then
his career was gobbled up by Spider-Man. Since starring in the
franchise, the only other film he has made besides The Good German
is the crowdpleasing, critically unloved Seabiscuit (2003).
But Maguire, who hardly cracks a smile during our meeting, argues
that he hasn't been restricted by Spider-Man. On the contrary, he
says he hasn't found roles that interest him.
"Personally, I would like to work more, but I just can't find things
I want to do," he says. "I hope to read some scripts that intrigue
me and compel me to want to go and work on them.
"I see all the movies that come out and it's not like I haven't read
the scripts beforehand." Is he saying that he turns them all down?
We never quite get to the bottom of this.
"If there was a role in my age-range," he goes on, "I was always
aware of it and either I wasn't interested in doing it for one
reason or another, or the director wasn't interested in me, or he
had a relationship with another actor. I really didn't miss a lot of
movies." There's not a small amount of selfpossession, veering on
arrogance, in his comments. He is only just into his third decade,
after all, and not as big a star as his old pal Leonardo DiCaprio. I
assume he is referring, specifically, to DiCaprio's closeness to
Martin Scorsese when he talks about special relationships.
Does he, I ask, compete with DiCaprio for the same films? Maguire
breaks into a rare smile. "I saw The Departed and I really enjoyed
that," is all he says.
He won't say much about his private life, either. He just wants to
keep it as private as possible, he says. On his new role as father,
he reveals only that " overall we're doing well and having fun and
that's about it". On his upcoming marriage to Meyer, he insists that
"those are private matters. In terms of sharing my private life with
the public, I don't think I have any responsibility to do that
whatsoever."
But maybe he has learned from past mistakes. His life thus far has
been far from private, and far from easy. His parents - a
construction worker and cook father and secretary mother - had him
when they were 18 and 20 respectively, and they split up when he was
two. He spent his youth shunting between various permutations of
parents, grandparents and aunts, an unsettling period which he has
said was a cause of great unhappiness.
When he was 12, his mother paid him $100 to take drama at high
school instead of home economics. Within 18 months, she and a
neighbour, who was an agent of sorts, were sending him out on
auditions.
He got TV work immediately but it was not until he was 16, in a play
in Los Angeles, that he became committed to acting.
"When I took drama class, it didn't really matter to me," he says.
"A hundred dollars was a good enough bribe for me to do it and I
loved school anyway. But it was only when I was doing this play that
I lost all of my self-consciousness and realised there was a lot for
me to learn and explore, I knew I could get good at it and be
successful."
He made his film debut in This Boy's Life in 1993 when he was 18,
playing opposite DiCaprio, with whom he had first acted in a TV
series four years earlier. The two became fast friends and a
permanent fixture on the LA party circuit. But at 19, Maguire
stopped drinking - three years ago, he inadvertently revealed that
he attends Alcoholics Anonymous - and became a vegetarian. Add
discipline and drive to his list of personal attributes.
Although he has been romantically linked to actresses such as
Rashida Jones, the daughter of Quincy Jones, and his Spider-Man
co-star Kirsten Dunst, Maguire only got seriously involved three
years ago when he started dating Meyer, then an employee with Ralph
Lauren and now a full-time jewellery designer who also happens to be
the daughter of one of Hollywood's biggest movie moguls, Ron Meyer,
president of Universal Studios.
So does it help having such an influential father-in-law-to-be?
"I've known him for years and nothing's ever come up one way or the
other," Maguire says, defensively.
"Pretty much everything I have done was prior to me having a close
relationship with him except for The Good German [which was made by
Universal rival Warner Bros]. It hasn't really done me any good so
far and I am not looking for that."
Cocky one minute, chippy the next, Maguire is a curious mix. That
I-don't-need-anyone's-help attitude keeps seeping through. It crops
up again when we discuss the early industry doubts about him being
cast as Spider-Man.
"For me, I didn't need [the scepticism] to motivate me. I was very
confident that I was going to do a good job and I didn't have any
reservations or doubts about what I was capable of. I have a really
strong work ethic ..." Which brings us back to Spider-Man 3. It's
the event movie of next year and surely if it grosses as much as
Spider-Man 2 ($785 million worldwide), the incentives for him to
come back will be too great to ignore.
"It's hard for me to imagine the multiple movies like a Spider-Man
4, 5 or 6 which are fresh, unique journeys for the character, that
explore different sides of him. I don't want to be repeating scenes
from a prior movie and I think we've really mined the most
interesting stories from Peter's world, big as it is."
"Look," he adds, emphatically, "if I read a script and went, 'Wow,
this is a great script and [director] Sam [Raimi] wants to do it,'
that is when I would be interested in doing it. For those things to
happen, however, is no small feat."
Mike Goodridge |
