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Jake Gyllenhaal Confirms He Was On the List to Replace Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 2
Spider-Man: Far From Home star Jake Gyllenhaal has confirmed old rumors about being in the running to play Peter Parker in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2. In Far From Home, Gyllenhaal plays Quentin Beck a.k.a. Mysterio, a superhero from another universe who teams up with Nick Fury and Spider-Man to defeat a collection of bad guys called the Elementals. However, this isn't Gyllenhaal's first brush with the Marvel movie universe.
Following the success of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, star Tobey Maguire was reportedly seeking a better contract for the sequel. While Spider-Man 2 was in development, Maguire played a jockey in the drama Seabiscuit. When the time came for him to join pre-production on the Marvel sequel, he refused, citing "mild discomfort" in his back that he didn't want to aggravate with stunts. Unfortunately for Maguire, he had overestimated how valuable he was to the franchise. Sony fired him, pushed back the movie's release date, and started looking for a new actor to play Peter Parker.
One of those actors was Gyllenhaal. Speaking in an interview with Yahoo! Movies, Gyllenhaal downplayed the significance of the whole affair, saying that, "in the end, [Maguire]'s Spider-Man," but confirmed that at one point he was in the running:
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"There are so many roles in my career where I was up against another actor, or something happened that possibly could've happened but didn't happen but maybe it would have… Eventually my belief is when an actor's played a character, particularly in a movie, the character's theirs, and that's that. But yeah [Maguire] hurt himself and there was talk. And there was a slew of actors [possibly up for the part], and I was one of them."
Maguire was shocked by the studio's dismissal of him and, not wanting to lose the lead role in the franchise, negotiated his way back into Spider-Man 2. Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal went on to star in disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow instead. Now, 15 years later, he's finally made his way into a Spider-Man movie - even if he isn't actually playing Peter Parker.
Hollywood is full of stories about alternative actors who were up for now-iconic roles, and it's always fun to wonder "what if" with those stories. Spider-Man: Far From Home's trailers have revealed that Thanos' snap opened up gateways to an entire multiverse, so perhaps in one of those universes Jake Gyllenhaal actually did take over from Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 2.
Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) release date: Jul 02, 2019
