Tobias Vincent Maguire was born on the 27th of June 1975, in Santa Monica, California, to Wendy Brown and Vincent Maguire. The parents (mostly Scottish-Americans) split at the age of two years old. Maguire spent the majority of his early years in the company of various family members.
When he was a child Maguire was interested in the possibility to become a professional chef. He was interested in enrolling in the home economics course when he was in the sixth grade. Maguire’s mother suggested that he enroll in the drama class instead and he opted to take it. The short-lived nature of his schooling started to take its strain on Maguire emotionally. After another move for his freshman year the student quit high school and didn’t ever return. Instead his acting career was pursued. In 2000, he completed an General Educational Development, noting that in his school years, “I was not doing school; I was showing up, but… not really giving myself.”
Maguire’s first appearance in a feature film was in 1989’s The Wizard. He worked as a child actor in the early 1990s, often playing roles much younger than his chronological age. Eventually, he was cast as the lead in the FOX TV
By the mid-1990s, he was working steadily but was also becoming involved in the hard-partying lifestyle of some of his fellow young actors. In 1995, he requested director Allan Moyle to release him from his part in the movie Empire Records. He then sought help for a drinking problem from Alcoholics Anonymous; he has been sober ever since.
In 2002, Maguire starred in Spider-Man, based on the popular Marvel Comics superhero. He reprised the role in the sequels and the video game adaptations of the films. In 2006, he starred in his first villainous role as Corporal Patrick Tully in Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German. In 2009 he starred alongside Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman in the Jim Sheridan-directed war drama Brothers as Sam Cahill, a prisoner of war. In 2008, he made a cameo appearance in the action comedy film Tropic Thunder as a gay 18th century monk.
Maguire was co-producer of Good People in 2012. He established his own production company, Material Pictures, in 2013. His next film, Pawn Sacrifice, was a Cold War thriller based on the true story of American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer. He reprised his role as Peter Parker in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021).
Maguire met jewelry designer Jennifer Meyer in 2003 while he was shooting Seabiscuit at Universal Studios. He and Meyer married on September 3, 2007, in Kailua Kona, Hawaii. Their second child, a son, was born in May 2009.
