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For those who either weren’t born yet or were living under a rock, a New York Magazine in the mid 90’s labeled a young group of actors who were dominating the LA and NY scene as ‘The Pussy Posse‘. It was a posse and friend group that consisted of big-time actors such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Kevin Connolly David Blaine, Tobey Maguire, Jay Ferguson and others.
If that isn’t a power posse I don’t know what is. Most of them had just reached stardom or very close to it and were on the peak of taking over Hollywood.
Connolly, who was Maguire’s roommate at the time, joined The Brilliantly Dumb Show and shared a great Maguire story about landing the role of Peter Parker aka Spider-Man. The director of ‘Spider-Man,’ Sam Raimi, had seen Maguire’s work before and wanted him to audition and train for the role to possibly have a chance at becoming the world’s next big-screen superhero.
“When I tell you Toby hit the gym, he hit it. And of course, Toby is all-natural, there was no cheating involved just stone-cold blood sweat and tears,” Connolly explained. “Toby shows up for his screen test in what I guess you could say was like a leotard and it was just really kind of hot so after the first couple takes he pulls off the leotard and the whole room was like ‘holy fuck.’ His body was just ripped.
So, Toby gathered us, a bunch of friends got together and we were like holy shit Toby this is crazy. He then told us, ‘yeah I got it, I got the role’ and that was a great moment because nobody deserved that more than Toby. He is the best, just the best, period, end of story, I love Toby.”
The rest was pretty much history as ‘Spider-Man’ set all types of box office records for what some will argue is the best superhero movie of all time. ‘Spider-Man’ brought in $821.7 million to the studio that had a $139 million budget.
Safe to say it was well worth the gym hours Maguire put in to land the role.
Be sure to check out the entire Kevin Connolly interview here.