Why Kate Winslet convinced Tobey Maguire he’d made his best movie: “My crowning achievement”
In a couple of weeks, we will get another new Spider-Man movie with Tom Holland from Marvel, and it will no doubt do enormous numbers, but we should never forget the groundwork laid by the original, brilliant trilogy directed by Sam Raimi and starring Tobey Maguire.
Despite some rather understandably wonky CGI, given they began in 2002, the Maguire movies still stack up superbly as films starring the famous web-slinger that are completely different in feel to the Holland years; much more comic book and very cartoonish, but played superbly by the Californian, with able support from an absolutely mental Willem Dafoe as the Green Goblin.
Of course, Maguire was brought back into the fold to superb effect along with the other previous wall-crawler, Andrew Garfield, in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, but it doesn’t look like he’ll be back for this year’s effort sadly, because he managed to head off to his own universe at the end of that film, despite being stabbed by the nasty aforementioned Goblin.
His work as Peter Parker officially came to an end the first time around when his trilogy wrapped up in 2007, leaving him to find some other roles to take on after the guaranteed paycheck of the Raimi franchise.
His first major part following that was in 2009’s war drama Brothers with Jake Gyllenhaal, but the year before that, he made a cameo in one of the 2000’s best comedies, which turned out to be a career highlight.
He was asked on a Reddit AMA about which of his films he would keep for posterity and replied, “I worked on Tropic Thunder for a few hours, and ran into Kate Winslet, who said that was my ‘crowning achievement’. At first, I was flattered, then I was scratching my head, wondering if that was a compliment or not. So maybe that?”
Directed by Ben Stiller, Tropic Thunder is a film that really rewards repeated viewings, as the layers of jokes and comic touches become clearer on the second or third watch around. The story of a group of egotistical actors making a Vietnam War movie, it stars Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr and Tom Cruise and was a big hit on release, earning $195million against a budget of $90m and earning Cruise a Golden Globe nomination and Downey Jr an Academy Award nod.
One of the most memorable parts of the film actually comes before any of it has started, as a series of fake movie trailers is shown, one of which is where Maguire appears in a clip for Satan’s Alley, which shows him alongside Downey Jr as Trappist monks caught in an illicit affair, complete with Enigma ‘Sadeness’ soundtrack and a recommendation from the Beijing Film Festival’s ‘Crying Monkey’ award.
Aside from his Spider-Man exploits, Maguire has been pretty quiet in recent years, other than a part in 2022’s Babylon with Margot Robbie. There have been persistent rumours however that he, or at least his Spidey suit, might have some kind of role to play in Avengers Doomsday at the end of the year, the Russo brothers’ spectacle that will unite almost every Marvel franchise in one way or another.
