The movie that sent Tobey Maguire into Hollywood exile: “I had some time on my hands”
At one point in the 2000s, Tobey Maguire was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood thanks to his stint as Marvel’s most popular character in three enormous blockbusters. Once he finished playing the wallcrawler in 2007’s Spider-Man 3, though, he became pretty circumspect in what roles he would take on for the next several years.
Indeed, between 2008 and 2013, Maguire appeared in only four movies in lead roles, plus a quick cameo in Tropic Thunder. Compared to other A-list stars in Hollywood, who make multiple movies every single year, he had scaled his output back considerably. Then, in 2014, he succeeded in finally bringing a passion project to the big screen as producer and star, which seemed to signal a big future with more creative involvement in his films. Then, he disappeared for seven long years.
While being interviewed about Pawn Sacrifice at the time, Maguire indicated to Variety that he began looking into producing because he wasn’t exactly rushed off his feet with acting jobs. “I had some time on my hands,” he deadpanned, adding, “It wasn’t like I was acting in movie after movie. I just started going, ‘All right, let me find things that I want to develop or try to build into movies that I want to make, because I’m not seeing scripts I want to do.'”
So, Maguire poured his efforts into bringing the story of Bobby Fischer, the American chess prodigy who challenged Soviet chess grandmasters at the height of the Cold War and ended up facing off against Boris Spassky in the 1972 World Chess Championship match. As director Edward Zwick put it, the movie was a tough sell, with the Blood Diamond helmer admitting, “I don’t have to tell you how many serious adult movies of any kind of intellectual ambition the studios are making right now.”
Depressingly for Maguire and Zwick, if not unsurprisingly, Pawn Sacrifice tanked at the box office, and after that, Maguire retreated from the limelight. For the next seven years, his only acting role was a vocal one in 2017’s The Boss Baby, but his face was nowhere to be seen in live-action films. He did manage to shepherd six films to fruition as a producer, including The 5th Wave and The Best of Enemies, but it couldn’t be denied that he was effectively in Hollywood exile.
What pushed Maguire into taking so long away from acting, though? Well, when he finally returned in 2021 with the one-two punch of a debauched supporting part in Babylon and his reprisal of his signature role in Spider-Man: No Way Home, he indicated to Entertainment Weekly that it takes an awful lot to get him enthused these days. Director Damien Chazelle gave him the pick of roles in Babylon and would regularly run through the script at his house, and it still took him a long time to settle on James McKay, the pale, greasy-haired ghoul who leads audiences through the film’s sleazy ‘Old Hollywood’ party scene.
Then, when EW asked what Maguire planned to do next, now that he had returned to the screen, he shrugged, “Good question. I don’t have anything specific in mind.” He revealed that he now approaches roles and scripts from the perspective of “when a song comes on and you either want to get up and dance to that song or you don’t.” A role has to call to him profoundly, otherwise he’ll continue to sit on the sidelines, likely because he made enough money on the Spider-Man movies that he never truly needs to work again.
However, there may be something else at play here with regards to Maguire’s Hollywood exile. In 2011, he was linked to Molly Bloom’s infamous illegal Hollywood gambling ring, along with fellow celebs Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, and Matt Damon. However, Maguire wound up part of a lawsuit from a poker player serving ten years in prison for tax fraud, who claimed Maguire won more than $300,000 from him in one of the illegal poker games. Much of this money came from illegal means, so Maguire settled out of court for $80,000.
Maguire’s public image also took a hit when Bloom claimed he was by far her worst celebrity client, and he supposedly once made a female player “bark like a seal” to humiliate her in front of the group. Perhaps this made him persona non grata in Hollywood, and when that was coupled with a healthy apathy toward work, an exile was always likely.
