Bobby Fischer is a complicated fellow and no one knows that more than the actor charged with portraying him in the stunning film Pawn Sacrifice, Tobey Maguire.
We caught up with Maguire for an exclusive video interview where the former cinematic superhero told us about what aspects of the chess superstar’s life most surprised him while delving deep into his study on the man who brought chess to the masses in the mid-’70s at the height of the Cold War.
Pawn Sacrifice follows Fischer’s rise from child prodigy to world champion at a time when the only global chess dominators were always Russian.
Liev Schreiber portrays his Soviet nemesis, Boris Spassky, as the two embark on a fateful collision course that is about much more than chess by the time the two meet in the World Chess Championships in Iceland.
Each of their homelands will paint the match as a way of putting a barometer on which country is winning in the Cold War.
The thing is, each man will see it as something different. Chess is an individual sport where the battle goes on silently in each competitor’s mind.
Fischer, for one, had much more than chess moves competing for his mental attention. The American chess champ notoriously had mental health issues that he battled throughout his entire life.
In the hands of Maguire, that struggle is told in the most stunning way in the Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai, The Siege) helmed biopic.