HERMOSA BEACH, Calif. — Behind the mask, Chris Daniels is a stranger.

You wouldn’t know his roots are right here in Southwest Florida. That he was raised in San Carlos Park and attended Estero High. That he was born in Naples.

Behind the mask, Daniels isn’t your friendly neighbor. He is your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, spinning and flipping and beating up bad guys.

That’s right. The fella who does all the cool stuff for Tobey Maguire, the lead stunt double for Maguire in each of the three Spider-Man films, is as Southwest Florida as Bonita Beach.

Daniels now lives on the second floor of the South Bay duplex he owns, about 30 miles south of Hollywood. He has credits as a stunt man in several TV shows and big-budget films, but the 30-year-old’s biggest splash thus far is tied to Peter Parker’s alter ego.

Heck, he’s Spider-Man.

Maguire might get the glory. It is Daniels, though, who always saves the day.

“I just got hired on to do a job — to do stunts and have fun,” Daniels says, recalling his work on the original Spidey flick. “I didn’t realize how big of a step in my career it would prove to be.”

But even his legacy lives under cover.

There is no picture of Daniels, a ‘94 alumnus, in his alma mater’s gymnasium, no press clippings hanging in the library. Not even a Spider-Man poster can be found.

Talk to enough Estero teachers and administrators, though, and they’ll tell you they are proud of Daniels, even if most had never heard of him.

“It’s kind of weird,” says assistant principal Howard Wendland, who has been at the school since it opened, 20 years ago this month. “I don’t know anything about him.”

Then again, that’s the nature of the stunt industry. Daniels is in the business of going unnoticed.

How often does someone hand out an autograph without revealing his name? Daniels does it all the time, signing “Spider-Man” for everyone from kids in California to his father Fred Daniels, whose San Carlos Park living room is a virtual Spidey shrine.

“That’s what I actually like about being behind the scenes,” Daniels says. “I get to go out there, have a good time, have fun — it’s like being a big kid on a playground, and I get paid to play. Then I can go out to dinner with my girlfriend or whatever else and nobody knows who I am. I don’t have to worry about the paparazzi all over you.”

In this way, Daniels is the perfect fit for his profession. He has always aimed to blend right in, sort of like a man behind a mask.

ITSY-BITSY SPIDER

Turn to page 64 of the ’94 yearbook. There is Spider-Man, before he caught the bug.

Estero’s seniors voted on classmates in 20 categories. Most Athletic, Most Talented, you know the drill.

Daniels is one of the honorees. Most Shy. The selection is a nod to the young man’s penchant for rarely starting a fuss, or even a conversation.

“He was the guy in the back — but always there,” says Chad McDaniel, who met Daniels when they were classmates at Bonita Middle School and graduated from Estero with him. “He was kind of shy and to himself, but I think that was just his way of walking the straight and narrow.”

Most Shy? Most Busy, too, perhaps.

Daniels had a different suit for every season. He lettered in track and field and wrestling and played receiver and safety on the football team, named one of three captains on the ’93 squad, Joe Hampton’s only district championship team.

In the evening, Daniels wore tights. He was as much a part of the Robin Dawn Academy of Performing Arts as the walls and mirrors, reporting to the Cape Coral studio for gymnastics and dance lessons from age 3 through his senior year.

And Daniels had a summer job, to boot. About the time he entered high school, Chris started hopping into his father’s van with a hammer on his hip. Fred, a second-generation carpenter, taught his son the family trade, the same way Fred’s father once taught him.

Maybe Chris would be next. Or maybe not.

“Not to say being a carpenter isn’t a good career,” Fred Daniels says, “but I didn’t want him in the hot sun beating nails all his life.”

Turns out, Fred’s kid could nail more than door panels and wall frames. He could nail handsprings and somersaults and back-flips.

Daniels could dance, too.

“I even talked him into ballet,” says Robin Dawn Ryan, who opened her studio three decades ago, “but his favorite was jazz, and he also did some tap.”

By middle school, though, Daniels began hearing more than dance music. He also heard snickers. Classmates wondered why he tumbled off to the Cape every evening, preferring the glow of stage lighting to the collisions of football practice.

The pressure wore on him, Daniels says, and he quit going a couple of times. But he always found his way back.

“There were lots of girls at the dance competitions,” Daniels says, “and I was at that age. I liked being able to hang out with them.”

Soon enough, Daniels gave his classmates a taste of what he’d been doing up the road all this time. He performed a tumbling routine in the Bonita Middle talent show, a bit that is remembered for more than the glimpse it gave into the student’s after-school escape.

That day, Daniels revealed some of the tools that would help shape his future. Not that anyone knew, least of all the shy kid doing flips across the stage.

MAN ON FIRE

Daniels was born Oct. 1, 1976, in Naples Community Hospital. That’s 26 years before the release of the first Spider-Man movie -- and 18 years before Chris performed his first stunt.

As a boy, Daniels doesn’t remember pushing the envelope. Doesn’t remember doing anything riskier, really, than a few innocent jumps on his bicycle.

If Estero had voted a classmate Most Likely To Be A Superhero’s Stunt Double, it surely would have been someone else. It would have been one of the guys who jumped off the New Pass Bridge, or swung from rope swings in Island Park.

For his part, Daniels only wanted to play college football. But he stood about 5-foot-10, 135 pounds on graduation day, still a year or two from filling out.

Daniels found a fallback not far from home — or his heart. He accepted a job on the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular after hearing the popular MGM Studios show needed tumblers. About the only thing he liked as much as football was tumbling.

But his first day on set, Daniels noticed a problem.

Fight scenes. Explosions. People falling from buildings.

Uh-oh.

“I didn’t know it was a stunt show,” Daniels says. “I just knew they were looking for people who could tumble.”

Originally, Daniels planned to stick around for only a couple of years, until he saved enough money to put himself through college.

Originally.

One day, Daniels went crashing through one of those stunt scenes and got up with a grin. He was having fun and being paid for it. What he always wanted.

“I never really wanted to have a real job,” Daniels says, drawing laughs from a couple of stunt buddies across the room. “I don’t think I ever wanted to have an office job or anything. I wanted something fun.”

On the Indiana Jones show, Daniels had a ball. Especially after he got close to a guy named Norb Phillips, a stunt veteran who was working with Daniels at MGM.

Phillips set Daniels on fire with his knowledge, and he also set him on fire, period. He put him in a flaming suit and showed him how to get out of it alive. He also showed him other tricks of the trade, such as car hits and stunt driving.

Eventually, Hollywood beckoned.

Daniels headed west in the fall of 1999 and started hustling stunt coordinators. He would show up on sets just to show his face, then come back two weeks later and show it again.

In his first two months there, Daniels made appearances in “VIP” and “Martial Law.” He never waited tables, taught classes, parked cars, the standard for most Hollywood newbies until they get their feet under them.

“He was a very determined kid,” says his mother, Sandy Daniels, who lives in Fort Myers, “and he has a good head on his shoulders. He’s always been like that.”

Indeed, Sandy’s favorite story about Daniels has nothing to do with Spider-Man. She talks of the day she asked if he could stay home from school to baby-sit sister Valerie. Chris didn’t hesitate. He picked up his book bag and hustled out the door.

Sandy’s son never stayed home from school. He had perfect attendance from kindergarten through graduation.

Such drive followed Daniels to California. Consider, for instance, the time he broke his tailbone in 2001. Never much for resting, he was back at work the following morning.

“I went to the hospital.” Daniels says. “They said I had a broken tailbone. There’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t put a cast on it or anything, so you just work through it.”

Speaking of breaks, Daniels got his biggest away from the set. It came in July 2000, when opportunity knocked behind the door next door.

THE RIGHT FIT

Sandy Daniels made the Spider-Man suit.

She used Spandex for the pants and a red leotard for the top. She drew web lines using a black magic marker. She drew a spider on the chest.

Voila! A superhero.

Sandy’s son joined Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and Robin — four gymnastics classmates, actually — for a superhero-themed routine in a statewide competition. Daniels dressed as Spider-Man because, well, that’s the role his instructor assigned him.

“You look back,” Sandy says, “and you wonder if he was destined to be Spider-Man.”

The way it played out, you do wonder.

Bill Fuqua, who owns a stunt service in North Hollywood, happens to have an office next-door to an extras casting agency, and there happened to be an audition of sorts there.

With casting on the horizon, the makers of “Spider-Man” needed a model off which to design the star character’s suit. Fuqua caught wind and went to Daniels, who had two things going for him: He was the right size (5-foot-11, 165 pounds), and he had a background in modeling.

Ultimately, the wardrobe crew invited 50 prospects and lined them up in their underwear. Daniels fit the mold.

On the surface, anyway, earning the nod didn’t mean anything for Daniels’ stunt career. It only meant he would get to model a really cool suit.

But hey, that’s a foot in the door.

“They started building the suit off of me,” Daniels says. “Then I found out who the (stunt) coordinator was and found out he was looking for people to come in and interview. I told him, ‘Look, they’re already building the suit off me, and I do stunts.’ ”

A few weeks later, Daniels walked into another room and stepped into another line of prospects. This time, the "Spider-Man" folks were looking for Maguire's stunt double.

Four of the 10 men in the room were chosen. Daniels, Mark Wagner and two backups.

Daniels clung to the role.

He purchased a stack of comic books, took them home and studied Spider-Man’s mannerisms. He practiced Spidey’s poses on the coffee table in his living room. He filmed a Spidey demo and put it in the hands of the stunt coordinator.

Clearly, Daniels was determined to do more than flip, crash and fight. He put more than himself into the suit; he put personality into it, too.

“I ended up doing a lot more in the suit than I thought,” Daniels says. “I did a lot more with the poses and the movements. I worked with Tobey and helped bring the actual Spider-Man character to life.”

Daniels has been signing “Spider-Man” ever since. He has been the face behind the mask in movie posters, on the cover of magazines — basically, anywhere you see the suit.

“I’d say the Spider-Man role is about the coolest thing going,” says fellow stunt man Alex Chansky, one of the backups in the first film. “It’s nice to double a big actor like Tom Cruise or Harrison Ford over the years, but you don’t get the same type of excitement that Chris does, with kids wanting your autograph and everything.”

It’s not just the kids, though. In the living room of the 1,100-square-foot stilt house where Chris grew up, Fred Daniels has enough memorabilia on display to fuel an entire Spider-Man convention.

A bobble-head doll. A PEZ dispenser. A steering-wheel cover. Autographed posters. Set credentials. An unopened pack of trading cards.

“I’ll be walking along and see something,” Fred says. “I just go ahead and pick it up.”

For her part, Sandy, a hairstylist, keeps a couple of pictures pinned to the mirror inside her Fort Myers shop. Chris is dressed casually in the photos, not in costume, but the subject of children and what they’re doing seems to come up quite a bit.

She’ll only brag if you ask.

“Yeah,” she tells her customers, “he’s in Spider-Man. One, two and three.”

CONTINUING TO CLIMB

Outside of the mask, Chris Daniels looks more like a model than a stunt man. He has a square jaw and dimples, and his body is that of a bony, teenage gymnast who grew up and filled out.

He’s still in one piece, too, which is good. But he says it’s not unusual.

“Stunt men aren’t like stunt devils,” Daniels says. “Everything we do, most of it is safety-first.”

In fact, the only visible damage to his body is on his left leg. It has a five-inch scar below the knee, the result of a Spider-Man crash that required 23 stitches.

“I was out seven days,” Daniels says.

Outside of the mask, Daniels still prefers blending in to standing out. That might be why there is almost no Spider-Man flavor in his apartment. Just a standard blue blanket that rests on the sofa, something that looks like it could have come from Target or Wal-Mart.

And that’s Chico’s.

“That’s like his favorite thing,” Daniels says of Chico, his girlfriend’s Chihuahua. “He curls up and goes to sleep on it all the time.”

Daniels considers himself a beach boy and a "Southern boy." He likes Hermosa Beach, home to 18,500 residents, because it separates him from the hustle of Hollywood and because a game of beach volleyball is only one mile away.

But as in high school, Daniels keeps himself busy. He dabbles in real estate when he’s not pitching himself to stunt coordinators. He leases a house and a fourplex in Southern California and two condos in Cape Coral; he also owns seven lots in Port Charlotte.

In addition, Daniels has taken on speaking engagements. He makes the rounds. He swings onto college campuses and into business conventions to talk about his experiences in the stunt industry. He talks about how much fun he has had.

“Chris is probably the most successful stunt man for his age I know,” Chansky says. “Considering the amount of time he’s been out here, he’s probably the biggest success story I know.”

Daniels isn’t just Spider-Man, either.

Other movies you wouldn’t have noticed him in: “Lady Luck,” “Alpha Dog,” “Jarhead,” “Species 3,” “Charlie’s Angels 2.”

Some TV shows: “Boston Public,” “Martial Law,” “CSI: Miami,” “CSI: New York,” “The Practice.”

Daniels says his annual income has been as much as $300,000-plus. The three Spidey flicks, naturally, have provided the biggest payouts, and he suspects there will be another soon and that he will be the stunt double for whoever plays the lead role.

“I can’t say definitely,” he says, “but as long as they ask me and the negotiations go right, I’d do it. Part of it depends on whether they’re hiring a new stunt coordinator, the same actor, the same producers. But I’ve talked to some people about it. I hope I’d be in it.”

Rest assured, Daniels would enjoy every second of the fourth film. There is no place he feels more comfortable than inside that suit.

Behind that mask.