Spider-Man Star Confesses He Forged An Autograph
A fan once mistook Tobey Maguire of Spider-Man fame for Elijah Wood, so he went with it and forged the star's signature.
Tobey Maguire, star of the first Spider-Man films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, will do anything to make his fans happy – even if they aren’t really his fans. CBR reports that the actor once signed an autograph as Elijah Wood. “I didn’t want to disappoint her by telling her I wasn’t Elijah,” he said during a recent AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit.
It isn’t too big of a stretch to think that someone could mix up the two actors. They both became household names around the same time, with Elijah Wood breaking out as Frodo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s insanely popular Lord of the Rings films and Tobey Maguire gaining recognition for playing Spider-Man. The first Lord of the Rings film, Fellowship of the Ring, was released in 2001, with Spider-Man coming out in 2002, so the two are contemporaries as well as lookalikes.
What makes this situation even funnier, however, is that Tobey Maguire is not the only one who has been mistaken for Elijah Wood in the past. The Spider-Man star shares that odd honor with Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe as well. In an interview also shared by CBR, Radcliffe said that one day a man yelled out his car window, “Hey Frodo, I love your work,” and the actor was too nice of a guy to correct him. “He’s had a good day because he’s met Elijah Wood,” he said, “why would I screw that up for him?”
Radcliffe went on to say that he thinks he and Wood are so similar that he would choose the actor to play himself in a biopic if he could, even if Wood is older than him. He feels that, if the situation were reversed, Wood would likely choose Radcliffe to play him as well, because “we are of a type.”
Tobey Maguire must be of this same type, but luckily he, too, is friendly and polite enough not to make a big deal out of it. Spider-Man, Lord of the Rings, po-tay-to, po-tah-to, right? It’s all good as long as the fan is excited.
Readers on Reddit got a kick out of Tobey Maguire’s story but also took his AMA as an opportunity to ask him about a time when he wasn’t so nice: Spider-Man 3. In this film, Peter Parker comes into contact with Venom and becomes arrogant and mean when he and the symbiote combine.
Fans, who were used to seeing Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man as a goodie-goodie, slightly milquetoast kind of a guy, thought it was hilarious to see “Emo Peter Parker,” which is why there is now a series of memes and videos called “Bully Maguire,” in which Peter Parker is dressed in dark colors and being sassy toward everyone.
When asked how he felt about those memes, Tobey Maguire said he didn’t have much of an opinion about the Spider-Man meme either way. He didn’t even know they existed at first, and when he did find out about them, he thought they were more funny than troubling. He went on to make the joke that he still practices his famous Bully Maguire dance from Spider-Man 3 every morning.
Tobey Maguire is one of the best-loved of the three Spider-Man actors in the MCU, which is why fans were bursting with excitement when Elijah Wood – I mean, Tobey Maguire – reprised his role as Spider-Man in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home. And for all we know, there’s a chance Elijah Wood or even Daniele Radcliffe could someday play Spidey variants on the big screen.
