Tobey Maguire took a huge gamble by becoming an actor.
He grew up like a lot of celebrities, poor, but betting on himself and his talent, he chose to go into acting as a kid, mainly because he had nothing else to lose. Navigating the business as a child star, he had his best friend, Leonardo DiCaprio, and their infamous friend group the Pussy Posse watching his back.
Until he chose to star as Peter Parker in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, which was so successful, it earned itself a franchise and made Maguire millions (although there was drama onset during Spider-Man 2 that made him seem like a diva).
After Spider-Man 3, Maguire vanished. He left our screens to make even more money at the poker tables. Betting on himself one last time, Maguire took his last great role, Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, with DiCaprio as the elusive titular role, but has yet to fully return to acting.
Maguire clearly has other means of income to keep his $75 million net worth alive, but how did he go from being poor to one of Hollywood's leading men and then to Player X?
Maguire Knew He'd Be Someone Special
Like Jay Gatsby himself, Maguire knew he was destined for something greater. He just needed the right role to pluck him out of obscurity.
When he was three, his parents, who had him young, split. He moved around a lot, from relative to relative, as a result, but he told Parade that he didn't see himself as a victim. He always felt loved.
Ultimately, from a young age, Maguire learned he had to be the one controlling the stakes in his life. "My feelings of love or security or happiness – they were all in my own hands. I had plenty of difficult, emotional, and scary times as a kid, but I don’t dwell on it. Growing up the way I did, I had a very serious ambition to make some money, to have some security and comfort in my life."
Changing his stars wasn't easy, but he knew he'd make it because he wasn't worried about getting by.
"It's about having your brain space occupied by worrying about what I'm going to eat or how I'm going to pay rent, which is something I have contended with in life. Once you're not having to worry about that on a day-to-day basis, it allows you space to think about other things," he told The Guardian.
"As a kid, I was very poor. I mean, it's all relative, but we would get groceries from neighbors. I always had a roof over my head, but I slept on couches of relatives, and some night we wandered into a shelter. My family had food stamps and government medical insurance. And I wanted to get out of that, so my ambition was initially to make money; I was pretty driven."
The Guardian wondered why he didn't go to law school if he wanted to make money. With acting, "the odds are less good than winning the lottery." The odds don't faze Maguire. He likens his unlikely success, and other's, to the moon landing.
"Your imagination is not tethered to reality, or infrastructure, or statistics. What is any of that, anyway? I think our lives are a product of our imaginations," he explained.
Maguire is a realist. He knew he couldn't be an NBA player but knew he had talent. "If [there's something] I really want, I could find a strategy and put the work behind it to go and achieve that, whatever the odds."
He later earned four consecutive roles in Pleasantville, The Cider House Rules, Ride with the Devil, and Wonder Boys. Two years later, he was paid $4 million for Peter Paker in Spider-Man, $17.5 million, plus five percent of the box office gross for Spider-Man 2, and $15 million, plus 7.5 percent of the backend, for Spider-Man 3. Seabiscuit made him $12.5 million.
Sucess turned Maguire into a wary spender, which was "definitely a product of where I came from." He never wanted to be one of those people who squandered their fortune immediately. "I just never wanted to put myself in the position where my spending was so huge that I had to keep making movie after movie."
But after making so much money, Maguire wanted to triple his profits using another skill of his.
He's 'Player X'
Maguire thinks he'd be successful doing virtually anything anywhere and would be able to survive because, "basically, that’s what I’ve had to do all my life."
"I'm self-aware enough to understand that it's statistically very hard to achieve the position I'm in," Maguire told The Guardian. "But I also think I have a lot of ingredients that are right for the path that I've chosen. I find the way, like water; I like to be productive. I'm constantly reflecting on personal progress. And since I was around 15, I knew I'd be successful. And so I got those ideas, and they have been north stars to me."
After Spider-Man 2, however, he took another gamble, literally, by becoming a high-stakes poker champion. He wanted to make even more money. So he went to Houston Curtis. Together, they set up the biggest high-stakes poker games Hollywood had ever seen "to win millions from his inexperienced competitors" like Ben Affleck, DiCaprio, and Matt Damon. The games were held from 2005 to 2009.
According to Curtis, Maguire "could have made up to $30 to $40 million from the games" throughout the four years. They even made a movie about it called Molly's Game. They based Player X on Maguire himself, although we don't know if that's such a great thing. Player X did some very unsavory things in the film based on Molly Bloom's book.
When the underground games were revealed to the FBI, however, Maguire had to pay an $80,000 fine for his involvement.
We don't know whether Maguire still plays in high-stakes games anymore, but his acting career has seen better days. Maguire will be alright if he's in trouble, though. He finds a way, like water, and follows those north stars whenever he can.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTErZ%2Bippeoe6S7zGirqJqVrnqurcauoKudXaOytXnWqKmtoF2lvLC%2BjJyfoqSUnbywsIxwbGalmaG5qrvNaA%3D%3D