Tobey Rant - His Reputation (possibly Part 1)

 Every time I think my crush is diminishing I find something that completely endears Tobey to me all over again. Yes, I’m still talking about him with rose colored glasses on. But him coming to the rescue of a girl who lost her bikini in the ocean or his involvement with ServiceNow is just sweet and wholesome. You can’t disagree with that, surely.

 However, all the things written about him that don’t make him look good keep popping up from time to time. Funny thing about that is, there’s never much substantial evidence nor, if you look properly at it, it doesn’t actually put him much in a bad light. His occasional spats with paparazzi is a good example of that.

 One thing that pops up on a regular basis is, that he’s a diva. This is always based on accounts from exactly two people, Charlize Theron and James Franco. Looking into it (a little bit), these two have their own reputation problems and a lot more rumors of bad behaviour and not getting along with people. So, because Charlize Theron and James Franco had some problems with Tobey (and many other people) and that makes Tobey a diva? Right….

 The second point Tobey’s diva behavior is based on are his back problems and accompanying demands on the Spider-man 2 set. Asking more money, yeah, seems greedy. Asking to have a doctor present and have the amount of steps counted, seems to go a bit far. However, health is important, and some demands I wouldn’t mind accepting, like the doctor present on set. However, there are many more options he could have gone for, which in the end, I believe, he did go for, like changing his exersizes. He also apologized later and admitted he made a mistake.

I’m not going to say anything about him firing his agent shortly after. It might have to do with what happened then, but it’s also very possible it was just something that was bound to happen anyway. I don’t know what happened there nor why.

 Then there’s his poker history and rumoured bad behaviour around the table. I will say one thing, I do believe Tobey was the best player and a sour loser. I watched him play Connect 4 with Jimmy Kimmel and he was a bit too keen at some point almost playing before his turn. And from what I understood from an account from Tobey’s friend Houston Curtis, Tobey did demand Molly Bloom to bark like a seal for a $1000 tip. Apparently, he was trying to make a point that he felt she was taking away too much money from those games. I don’t know how that explanation is supposed to redeem Tobey. So by humiliating someone he was trying to make the point that she was greedy in a game he had originally set up to feed his own greed. Yes, that sounds great.

 I do believe Tobey wasn’t aware of the Ponzi scheme one of the other players was running, nor that the money he won came from that. I believe at that point Tobey had left the organization of those games completely to Molly Bloom and it makes sense he trusted she had done her background checks properly, because she was also the bank depended on clean noses. However, he could easily have paid up those $300.000 instead of the settled amount of $80.000. It wasn’t as if that would make him bankrupt.

 That’s the only gripe I really have with Tobey’s behaviour; his greed. Other than that, he seems like a normal man to me, trying to do the right thing. He tends to take some time out for his fans, he’s usually very nice and polite and he has tied his name to some charitable organizations and actions.

 And when you look at the dirt that comes up from time to time, it’s always the same short list of stuff, with questionable sources and/or pulled out of context.

 I omitted the whole Don’s Plum saga, because I still don’t quite understand what happened there. Also most people involved were very young and a lot of mistakes were made by all involved including Tobey. But they were very young and very naïve; I’m not willing to hold that over his head forever, nor any of the others involved.