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A very obvious, glaring question to anyone watching Spider-Man movies directed by Sam Raimi is “how old is that guy?” Actor Tobey Maguire was cast as a high-school teenager in a movie where he doesn’t resemble that character at all. To further push this point, other iterations of Spider-Man films had younger looking actors like Tom Holland and Andrew Garfield. So the question remains: how old was Tobey Magure in Spider-Man from 2002?
If your guess was 30, you were close. When cast in the year 2000, Tobey Maguire was about 25 years old. By the time the movie was released, he was around 27. I say “around” because he was born June 1975 and the movie was released May 2002. The point is that this guy does not look like he was in high school. But to be fair, neither do the other actors. For example, Kirsten Dunst didn’t exactly look like she was in high school neither, but basic math says that since she was born in 1982, she was about 18 years old in 2000.
The issue is not only with how old was Toby Maguire in Spider-Man, but also that there is something inherently unlikable about his personal character. This is shown more clearly when he is cast in roles as a jerk, for example in Spider-Man 3. Another example would be in the movie Pawn Sacrifice. He portrays the master of all jerks, Bobby Fischer, so well that you’d swear they were siblings. (Which is ironic casting since it was a movie made by his own production house.) In a live interview with Howard Stern on the radio, a listener called in and said that Maguire refused to sign autographs, even for children. So this doesn’t exactly paint a beautiful picture for Maguire’s personality. Let’s not forget that he initially got fired from Spider-Man 2 because he wanted scheduling accommodations.
With the newer Spider-Man movie series starring Andrew Garfield, you would have thought that things could only go uphill from there. Unfortunately there was backlash for the way Garfield portrayed Peter Parker as an unlikable person. But to be fair, Tom Holland seemed like a whiny little kid while playing Spider-Man, but perhaps that was the intention? Leave a comment and tell me your favorite Spider-Man actor. Or none of the above.