Tobey Grows Up

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Based on the best-selling book by Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit tells the true story of an ornery, undersize, beaten-up Thoroughbred who becomes a champion in the 1930s. Seabiscuit is discovered by a broken-down cowboy (Chris Cooper) and a rich dilettante named Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges), who nurse him back to health. They need a rider who can handle him. Enter Maguire as Red Pollard, a bitter, washed-up jockey who was abandoned by his parents as a kid, then grew up too tall to make the big time. Along the way, Pollard lost the sight in one eye, and by the time Team Seabiscuit finds him he's boxing on the side (and losing) to make ends meet. Writer-director Gary Ross, who directed Maguire in Pleasantville, wrote the role for him, but Maguire had to be physically transformed for it. His hair was dyed red and piled up on his head in an angry Brylcreemed ziggurat, and he had to slim down to 140 lbs. and 6% body fat.

Howard recognizes Pollard as a kindred spirit for his stubborn steed and takes him in, becoming a kind of surrogate father to the angry, abandoned Red. "You kind of see his safe, secure, loving world get crushed, and you see his boyishness just drain out of him," Maguire explains. "He toughens up and withdraws and keeps himself guarded. And then you see that melt away again as he becomes part of this family." Watching Red slowly learn to trust those around him, you realize that Maguire has taken his standard boy-becomes-man routine and subverted it. He plays a man who, having been robbed of his childhood, becomes a boy for the first time.

There's enough of Pollard in Maguire — the guardedness, the tough childhood — to make a journalist's Spidey-sense tingle, but Maguire is emphatically not into making those kinds of connections. "My trust issues? I may have some," he says. "Having my guard up? I may do that. I don't sit there and pick out experiences or traits of mine. That would be more for Gary Ross to do. For me, I'm just playing the part."

Maybe so. But even Maguire can't keep his guard up forever. In the best scene in Spider-Man, Parker realizes he has superpowers and is so psyched about it that he goes running off over the Manhattan rooftops. In a way, Maguire plays the same scene again in Seabiscuit. Howard takes his new horse and his new jockey out to the country to open them up and find out what they can do, and we see for the first time what a miracle they have on their hands. Talking about the scene, Maguire sounds almost mesmerized. "I think what plays there is somebody who's just kind of desperate and hungry and broken down, and Seabiscuit and my character together reawaken themselves. He feels like when he was a kid and he rode horses and he loved it, and it felt right to him, like what he was supposed to do. And Seabiscuit's galloping, and I think it's just, it's just like that kind of epiphanic release in one's life, where you're just like ahhhhhh!" It's one of the rare moments when Maguire isn't holding back, when you can tell he knows one of those secrets every actor has to learn — that sometimes the essence of control is knowing when to let yourself lose it.