Teenage girls have carried on parasocial relationships with actors and singers since the dawn of celebrity culture, but only one — that we know of, anyway — has gone so far as to kidnap her famous crush: Shelby Hinkley, the fictional teen at the center of Samantha Hurley’s play I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire.
“I've been obsessed with celebrity and pop culture,” Hurley tells Teen Vogue about the plot of her debut piece, in which a fictionalized Tobey Maguire wakes up to find himself chained up in Shelby’s basement, now on at London’s Southwark Playhouse through August 24. (You can also purchase the script.) “Fandom eclipses time and generations.”
Given the title and the subject of the play, it might be surprising to learn that Hurley isn’t actually a huge Maguire fan. Beyond watching a few old interviews and some of his pre-2003 films (emphasis on some: “I couldn't get through Seabiscuit — I thought that was really awful,” she admits), Hurley didn’t do much research on the actor himself. “I think I know the character Tobey Maguire really well, but as far as him as a person, I wouldn't be surprised if he was a different person than what I thought,” she says.
What was more appealing about Maguire, and about the 2004 setting of the play, was how much more mysterious celebrities were in a world before social media. Celebrities couldn’t quite curate their public image as much as they can now, left instead to the whims of tabloid culture and the fantasies of teen girls’ imaginations.
“I feel like Tobey Maguire just has this perfect name. It's a great title — I'm a title person first,” Hurley explains. “And he's such an enigma of the early 2000s, which I think works really well. Tobey was really easy to slap whatever you want on him: he could be the boy next door, he could be the bad boy.”
I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire started out as a ten minute play written as homework for a playwriting class Hurley was taking at Ithaca College, and then evolved into a one-act play while Hurley was working as a tour guide at Radio City Music Hall to make ends meet after moving to New York City. When she entered this early version into a small one-act festival, Hurley found that it stood out from everything else being created at that time.
“It was interesting, because it seemed like a lot of people [in the block of plays at the festival] were writing intense, serious plays,” Hurley says. “I noticed this in my playwriting class too, that like, a lot of younger people were trying to write heavy trauma — and obviously, we're young and dealing with a lot of existential stuff, but everyone had their Arthur Miller and Neil Simon out. I was just like, I don't think that's my speed. I want to bridge comedy and playwriting.”
Making it as a playwright was proving difficult, so Hurley pivoted to sketch and improv, taking early steps in pursuing a career writing for late night TV. Then the pandemic happened, and she found herself back home in Maine. It felt like the right time to revisit I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire, and this time, Hurley was writing with the dream of putting it on at Edinburgh’s famous Fringe festival. But her main goal? Amusing her friends. “When I was writing Tobey, I was like, I'm gonna write this play to make my friend Tyler [Struble, also the director] laugh,” she says. “It was created in a vacuum of no expectations. That's what was really exciting and magical.”
Hurley compares the experience of writing and putting on I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire to being at summer camp; her friend Struble directs the production, while another college friend, Jacob Stuckelman, helped produce the play. Tessa Albertson was the first actor to ever play Shelby, helping to shape the character alongside Hurley through inside jokes and riffs developed over three years of working together.
“It feels a lot more special and meaningful that we all have contributed to it, instead of me coming in as the genius in the room, being like, ‘These are the lines, do them like this,’” Hurley says. “It feels like there's much more room for creativity and imagination. How do we make the best play when everyone is using their imaginations and has an equal say in the room?”
Shelby, of course, is the beating heart of the play: A 14 year-old girl with an absent father and neglectful mother who deals with bullying at school, she’s unquestionably unhinged (hello, she literally kidnaps her celebrity crush) but Hurley still treats her with care and tenderness. A big inspiration for I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire was Kaitlyn Tiffany’s book about teen girls and fandom, Everything I Need I Get From You.
“Everyone is like, ‘Oh, they're just silly girls who are obsessed with this boy,’ when in reality, it's about community, it’s about belonging,” Hurley says. “I was really interested in taking Shelby's story seriously and taking her love seriously. When I wrote the 10 minute play, it was all a fantasy, and then when I picked up the full length, I was like, ‘No, this is real.’ Stakes are high because for her, the stakes are so high. It’s giving validity to this girl's story and showing how community is maybe more important than the obsession itself.”
As seriously as Hurley takes the fictional Shelby’s feelings, she also wanted to balance it out with the fictional Maguire’s perspective. The playwright notes that previously, most pieces of art about obsession have almost exclusively taken the perspective of the obsessor. But the perspective of the object of obsession is just as interesting to her; she also references the recent Netflix hit Baby Reindeer about a comedian and his stalker (based on real experiences of the show’s writer, Richard Gadd). Hurley wants fans of I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire to reconsider their own relationships to celebrity and obsession as well.
“What was exciting to me about writing this was seeing Tobey's perspective and people seeing it from the celebrity’s point of view, actually seeing the real consequences of these behaviors on a human being,” Hurley says. “I hope people take celebrities a little less seriously, or that people read this play or see this play and then unfollow a celebrity on Instagram.”
And, in case you were wondering, Hurley hasn’t heard from Maguire himself — but he’s welcome to attend the play’s final days in London.
“If he wants to come, we will save a couple seats for him, for sure–I don't know if I want to be there,” she adds with a laugh. “But I think that would be exciting. I think he would like it.”
