Nearly 15 years after his final swing in 2007’s Spider-Man 3, Tobey Maguire is back as the web-slinger in Spider-Man: No Way Home. In his first on-screen role since Pawn Sacrifice in 2014, the 46-year-old actor and producer suits up when multiversal villains from the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, including Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) and Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), trespass in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After a spell cast by Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) unleashes the Multiverse, Maguire’s sage Spidey meets his franchise successors — Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland — in the first crossover uniting three generations of Spider-Men.
On SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show, Garfield revealed Maguire’s reaction to filming his fourth Spider-Man movie:
“He took a little bit of a sabbatical from acting for a while, much to my dismay, because I’m such a huge fan of him as an actor. He’s been focusing on other things and producing and life,” Garfield said of Maguire, producer of such films as Nobody and the forthcoming Babylon. “It was so awesome to be able to be present for him being on a film set as an actor again, and especially as that character. I grew up idolizing Tobey in that role and he’s such a huge part of that character for me, and just being a fan of him as an actor.”
Under director Jon Watts, Garfield said, “We had this amazing period of a couple of weeks before we started shooting where we were just kind of workshopping. We were throwing ideas around of what the relationship could develop into, what the dynamic could be, what the feeling towards each other is, and when we first see each other versus when we part ways, what’s the journey of that?”
Together, Maguire and Garfield shared a collaborative “creative experience” working out what would take shape as a brotherly bond between the younger Peter #1 (Holland), older brother Peter #2 (Maguire), and middle brother Peter #3 (Garfield).
“It felt protected. It was very strange. It didn’t feel like we were doing this big Spider-Man film. It felt like Tobey and I were really just working on a relationship between two characters and using our imaginations and playing. It felt very, very playful, like we were kind of two friends making a little Spider-Man short film and going, ‘Wouldn’t this be cool?'” Garfield said. “I think he really started to remember his connection to acting as well, his love of it, as if no time had passed.”
Their first scene together takes place on a scaffolding around the Statue of Liberty, Garfield and Maguire improvising the gag where Peter #3 helps Peter #2 crack his back.
“We’re like, ‘We’re older guys, how do we express that? How do we express that connection?’ I was like, ‘I want to be very needy of you, I want to make sure that you like me and you’re impressed by me,’ like I’m the younger brother to you that you never wanted,” Garfield said with a laugh. “It was just kind of playful. We had a whole day on that scaffolding just improvising and playing and trying things and finding out what the tone was, finding out who each other was. From there it was just incredibly fun.”
Spider-Man: No Way Home is now playing exclusively in theaters and will soon be available to own on digital.