Spider-Man's next move

Yet The Good German is a reminder of how good Maguire can be. Not that he's at all bad as Peter Parker. Just that his earlier work - in sophisticated films such as Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997), Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry (1997), Lasse Hallstrm's The Cider House Rules (1999) and Curtis Hanson's Wonder Boys (2000) - showed his potential to become one of his generation's best actors. Then his career was gobbled up by Spider-Man. Since starring in the franchise, the only other film he has made besides The Good German is the crowdpleasing, critically unloved Seabiscuit (2003).

But Maguire, who hardly cracks a smile during our meeting, argues that he hasn't been restricted by Spider-Man. On the contrary, he says he hasn't found roles that interest him.

"Personally, I would like to work more, but I just can't find things I want to do," he says. "I hope to read some scripts that intrigue me and compel me to want to go and work on them.

"I see all the movies that come out and it's not like I haven't read the scripts beforehand." Is he saying that he turns them all down? We never quite get to the bottom of this.

"If there was a role in my age-range," he goes on, "I was always aware of it and either I wasn't interested in doing it for one reason or another, or the director wasn't interested in me, or he had a relationship with another actor. I really didn't miss a lot of movies." There's not a small amount of selfpossession, veering on arrogance, in his comments. He is only just into his third decade, after all, and not as big a star as his old pal Leonardo DiCaprio. I assume he is referring, specifically, to DiCaprio's closeness to Martin Scorsese when he talks about special relationships.

Does he, I ask, compete with DiCaprio for the same films? Maguire breaks into a rare smile. "I saw The Departed and I really enjoyed that," is all he says.

He won't say much about his private life, either. He just wants to keep it as private as possible, he says. On his new role as father, he reveals only that " overall we're doing well and having fun and that's about it". On his upcoming marriage to Meyer, he insists that "those are private matters. In terms of sharing my private life with the public, I don't think I have any responsibility to do that whatsoever."

But maybe he has learned from past mistakes. His life thus far has been far from private, and far from easy. His parents - a construction worker and cook father and secretary mother - had him when they were 18 and 20 respectively, and they split up when he was two. He spent his youth shunting between various permutations of parents, grandparents and aunts, an unsettling period which he has said was a cause of great unhappiness.

When he was 12, his mother paid him $100 to take drama at high school instead of home economics. Within 18 months, she and a neighbour, who was an agent of sorts, were sending him out on auditions.

He got TV work immediately but it was not until he was 16, in a play in Los Angeles, that he became committed to acting.

"When I took drama class, it didn't really matter to me," he says. "A hundred dollars was a good enough bribe for me to do it and I loved school anyway. But it was only when I was doing this play that I lost all of my self-consciousness and realised there was a lot for me to learn and explore, I knew I could get good at it and be successful."

He made his film debut in This Boy's Life in 1993 when he was 18, playing opposite DiCaprio, with whom he had first acted in a TV series four years earlier. The two became fast friends and a permanent fixture on the LA party circuit. But at 19, Maguire stopped drinking - three years ago, he inadvertently revealed that he attends Alcoholics Anonymous - and became a vegetarian. Add discipline and drive to his list of personal attributes.

Although he has been romantically linked to actresses such as Rashida Jones, the daughter of Quincy Jones, and his Spider-Man co-star Kirsten Dunst, Maguire only got seriously involved three years ago when he started dating Meyer, then an employee with Ralph Lauren and now a full-time jewellery designer who also happens to be the daughter of one of Hollywood's biggest movie moguls, Ron Meyer, president of Universal Studios.

So does it help having such an influential father-in-law-to-be? "I've known him for years and nothing's ever come up one way or the other," Maguire says, defensively.

"Pretty much everything I have done was prior to me having a close relationship with him except for The Good German [which was made by Universal rival Warner Bros]. It hasn't really done me any good so far and I am not looking for that."

Cocky one minute, chippy the next, Maguire is a curious mix. That I-don't-need-anyone's-help attitude keeps seeping through. It crops up again when we discuss the early industry doubts about him being cast as Spider-Man.

"For me, I didn't need [the scepticism] to motivate me. I was very confident that I was going to do a good job and I didn't have any reservations or doubts about what I was capable of. I have a really strong work ethic ..." Which brings us back to Spider-Man 3. It's the event movie of next year and surely if it grosses as much as Spider-Man 2 ($785 million worldwide), the incentives for him to come back will be too great to ignore.

"It's hard for me to imagine the multiple movies like a Spider-Man 4, 5 or 6 which are fresh, unique journeys for the character, that explore different sides of him. I don't want to be repeating scenes from a prior movie and I think we've really mined the most interesting stories from Peter's world, big as it is."

"Look," he adds, emphatically, "if I read a script and went, 'Wow, this is a great script and [director] Sam [Raimi] wants to do it,' that is when I would be interested in doing it. For those things to happen, however, is no small feat."