Spider-Man: No Way Home Writer on Why Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield Couldn’t Just Be Cameos

Spider-Man is always going to be a box office success no matter what situation he’s put in, but the idea of all three live-action Spider-Man stars in the same movie has proven enough to break records. Spider-Man: No Way Home continues the story of Tom Holland’s take on the Web-Crawler, but it also brings in previous Peter Parkers Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield to assist with the defeat of several villains. Some fans may have expected Maguire and Garfield to have small cameos in No Way Home, but they actually have pivotal roles in the film, spending the majority of the third act on screen with Holland. 

Erik Sommers, who co-wrote the No Way Home script, recently told Gold Derby that Garfield and Maguire could’ve never been cameos. If those Spider-Men were going to be brought in to No Way Home, they had to play a significant role that honored their legacies.

“I think we knew right away that if we’re gonna do this, it can’t just feel like these cameos we’re doing for cameos sake” Sommers explained. “The biggest reaction can’t just be, ‘I can’t believe they got those guys,’ or something like that. We need to treat them like the characters that they are, we need to honor them, we need to honor the movies they were in. We need to give them some sort of emotional journey, they can’t just come and just show up for this cameo and then disappear. We had to write up to them as characters, and that was always the goal. The challenge was: how are we going to do that?” 

“Of course, the focus has to be our Spider-Man,” the writer continued. “This is his journey, his story, and things have to be in service to that. They can’t contradict it or pull from it, but at the same time, we want to give them something that is meaningful, and that was the real challenge. Jon Watts deserves a lot of credit for watching that ball in particular. In a lot of our conversations, he was really intent on making sure that both of the Spider-Mans that come and join the movie have their own journey. We all wanted to feel like, when Tobey and Andrew go back to where they came from, they will have learned something and grown. They will not be the same, their lives will not be the same because of what happened during this movie, just as our Peter will not be the same.”

What did you think of the roles Maguire and Garfield played in No Way Home? Let us know in the comments!

Spider-Man: No Way Home is playing in theaters everywhere.