How tall is Tobey Maguire?

How tall is Tobey Maguire?

Tobey Maguire is about 172.7 cm, or 5′8″. The figure comes from a rare piece of first-hand observation: in a 2003 TIME cover story written on the set of Spider-Man 2, the journalist Lev Grossman described Maguire sitting in a makeup chair and judged him "maybe 5 ft. 8 in." The site converts that to 172.7 cm. Wikidata does not record a height for him, and Maguire has not published a measured one, so the TIME estimate is the most direct source available.

It is worth being clear about what that figure is. A reporter's estimate is not a stadiometer reading, and the word "maybe" signals some uncertainty. But it was made in person, at close range, during a long on-set interview, and it fits neatly with his documented co-stars: level with Tom Holland, clearly shorter than Leonardo DiCaprio and Jake Gyllenhaal.

A child actor who stayed small and slim

Tobias Vincent Maguire was born in Santa Monica to parents who were 18 and 20 when he arrived. They divorced when he was a small child, and he grew up moving between relatives and states, often poor. As TIME told it, he wanted to take home economics in junior high, until his mother offered him $100 to take a drama class instead. His first on-screen job was an Atari commercial, followed by television parts on shows such as Blossom and Walker, Texas Ranger. His formal schooling ended after ninth grade.

In the 1980s he met another child actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, while the two were auditioning for the same parts. They became close friends, but for years DiCaprio kept landing the roles they both wanted: in the Parenthood TV series in 1990, and in This Boy's Life (1993), where DiCaprio took the lead and Maguire played one of his friends. Maguire later chose roles that would not put him in direct competition with his friend.

The "boy-man" image

TIME's 2003 profile placed Maguire in a type of film star it called boy-men: slim, fresh-faced, youthful actors who could play teenagers well into their twenties. His slight build and 5′8″ frame were part of that image. Through the late 1990s he played adolescents and young men in The Ice Storm (1997), Pleasantville (1998), The Cider House Rules (1999) and Wonder Boys (2000), and in 2002 he played a high-school Peter Parker at the age of 26.

Spider-Man and the height of Peter Parker

Sam Raimi's Spider-Man (2002) made Maguire a global star, and he played the role again in Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007). The comics give the character a specific size. Marvel's Official Handbook, as recorded on the site's Spider-Man character page, lists Peter Parker at 177.8 cm (5′10″). Maguire is about 5 cm shorter than that official figure, a difference of about 2 inches, while his successor Tom Holland falls short of it by almost exactly the same margin.

Two decades later, Maguire returned as Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), alongside the two actors who succeeded him, Tom Holland and Andrew Garfield. The film grossed over $1 billion, the first of the pandemic era to do so. The site lists Tom Holland at 173 cm, so he and Maguire are effectively the same height. The site does not hold a verified height for Garfield, so this page does not estimate it.

His leading lady in all three Raimi films was Kirsten Dunst, who played Mary Jane Watson. The two dated in 2001 and split the following year but stayed friends and kept playing the on-screen couple. The site does not hold a verified height for Dunst, so she is left out of the comparisons on this page.

The Spider-Man 2 recasting scare

The physical demands of Maguire's next film nearly cost him the Spider-Man role. Because of the toll of filming Seabiscuit, he was often absent from the Spider-Man 2 set, and the part was offered to Jake Gyllenhaal before Maguire secured it again. Gyllenhaal is listed at 181.6 cm, about 9 cm taller than Maguire. He later made his own Spider-Man franchise debut as the villain Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019), and he and Maguire played brothers in Jim Sheridan's Brothers (2009), a role that earned Maguire a Golden Globe nomination.

Seabiscuit: playing a jockey at 5′8″

The role that tested Maguire's body most was Red Pollard in Seabiscuit (2003), which he also executive produced. Pollard was a real Canadian jockey who rode the champion racehorse in the 1930s. According to his biography, he stood 5′7″ (1.70 m) and weighed 115 lb (52 kg), which was considered big for a jockey. TIME noted that in the film's story, Pollard had grown up too tall to make the big time.

To play him, Maguire, already slim, had to transform. TIME reported that he dyed his hair red and slimmed down to 140 lb and 6 percent body fat. His Wikipedia biography adds that he dramatically cut his calorie intake for the film, then had to regain weight rapidly for Spider-Man 2.

Even at his lightest, Maguire was more than 11 kg heavier than the real Pollard, and a few centimeters taller. The comparison also shows how demanding the standards of the sport were: at 5′7″ and 115 lb, Pollard himself was considered large for a jockey.

Tobey Maguire next to his co-stars

The site's data gives the following heights for actors who have shared the screen with Maguire:

The Great Gatsby

Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby (2013) reunited Maguire with DiCaprio, two decades after This Boy's Life. DiCaprio played Jay Gatsby and Maguire the narrator, Nick Carraway. At 185.4 cm, DiCaprio stood about 12.7 cm (5 inches) taller. It was the pair's biggest joint project, and the height gap between the old friends is the same one that existed when they competed for parts as teenagers, only now with both fully grown.

The Good German and Tropic Thunder

In Steven Soderbergh's The Good German (2006), Maguire played his first villain, Corporal Patrick Tully, opposite George Clooney, who is listed at 180 cm. In Tropic Thunder (2008), he made a cameo in a fake trailer opposite Robert Downey Jr., who is listed at 173 cm, effectively his height.

You can compare Maguire with any of these actors in the height comparison tool.

Roles where height did not matter

Several of Maguire's credits involve no visible body at all. He voiced Lou in Cats & Dogs (2001), and the adult Tim Templeton in the animated The Boss Baby (2017), reuniting with Alec Baldwin from the earlier film. He also appeared, through archive footage, as Spider-Man in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. In animation and voice work, a character's size is decided by artists, so these roles say nothing about the actor's height.

Other parts were brief but memorable. In Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) he played a hitchhiker picked up by Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo, and in Ang Lee's Civil War drama Ride with the Devil (1999) he played Jakob Roedel, the son of a German immigrant who joins his Southern friends in the Missouri Riders. Ang Lee had earlier cast him in The Ice Storm, and later planned to use him in Life of Pi (2012), but Maguire was cut during production for being too famous next to the rest of the cast, and his scenes were reshot with Rafe Spall.

More recently he has worked mostly as a producer. He founded Material Pictures in 2012, and in 2022 he appeared in and executive produced Damien Chazelle's ensemble film Babylon.

How Tobey Maguire compares with the average American man

Maguire was born in 1975. According to the NCD-RisC estimates used on the site's United States average height page, American men born in 1976 reached an average adult height of 177.5 cm. At 172.7 cm, Maguire is about 4.8 cm (just under 2 inches) shorter than the average man of his generation.

The CDC's measured national survey for 2015–2018 found that American men aged 20 and over averaged 175.3 cm, with a 25th percentile of 170.1 cm and a median of 175.4 cm. Maguire's 172.7 cm falls between those points, at roughly the 35th to 40th percentile. Among men aged 40 to 49, the group he belonged to when No Way Home was released, the average was 176.3 cm.

The height percentile calculator will give an exact percentile for any height.

Height, diet and a disciplined career

Maguire's approach to his body has been as controlled as the rest of his career. He has been vegetarian since 1992 and vegan since 2009, and he has adjusted his diet sharply for roles, as Seabiscuit and Spider-Man 2 showed. TIME described him as a disciplined manager of his own career who waits for parts he truly wants, rather than working just to stay busy.

His height has never been a barrier. A 5′8″ actor played one of the most famous superheroes in film, carried a horse-racing drama as a jockey, played the chess champion Bobby Fischer in Pawn Sacrifice (2014), and produced films through his company, Material Pictures. If anything, being slight and of ordinary height made him believable as Peter Parker, the everyday kid under the mask. To find more actors at similar heights, browse the celebrities hub.