Director Matthew Vaughn’s Daughter Is Convinced Taylor Swift Secretly Wrote the Spy-Novel-Turned-Movie ‘Argylle’
Written by djfrosty on January 17, 2024
Taylor Swift‘s Easter eggs are legion. And Swifties are legendary for scouring the planet to uncover every hidden clue, regardless of how improbable their theories might be. And the latest one is a twisted yarn for the ages.
Perhaps you’ve seen the trailer for Kingsman director Matthew Vaughn’s latest action flick, Argylle?The movie starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Henry Cavill, Dua Lipa and Samuel L. Jackson hits theaters on Feb. 2 and follows the adventures of a spy novelist who carts around an adorable Scottish fold cat in an argyle-print backpack with a peekaboo bubble that allows the kittie to observe the world on her owner’s real-life adventures.
The movie is based on a novel called Argylle written pseudonymously by an author known as Ellie (or in the movie, Elly) Conway that hit shelves on Jan. 9. So naturally Swifties think the singer — who over the past year has been setting records with her career-spanning Eras Tour, releasing re-recordings of her Speak Now and 1989 albums and criss-crossed the country to watch NFL boyfriend Travis Kelce crush the competition with the Kansas City Chiefs — wrote the book.
Some of the parallels do feel like Swift eggs, including the fact that TayTay loves wearing argyle sweaters, sometimes ghostwrites songs using pen names — even hawking a “Red (Taylor’s Version) Argyle Sweater” — and famously has two Scottish Folds, Meredith Grey and Olivia Benson. And, not for nothing, she carried Olivia Benson in a catpack similar to the one in the movie in her Miss Americana doc from 2020. Add in the fact that Swift directed the VMA-winning 14-minute All Too Well: The Short Film and is working on her feature directorial debut for Searchlight Films, for which she wrote the original script, and it all seems… plausible?
As Rolling Stone reported, because even the most dogged Swiftie could not find any internet history of author Conway anywhere, as well as all of the above, naturally they put two and six together and are convinced Swift is behind the book.
“I’m not a big internet guy, and it was actually my daughter who came up to me — this is the power of celebrity and the internet — and said, ‘You never told me Taylor wrote the book!’” Vaughn told the magazine. “And I’m looking at her going, ‘What are you talking about Taylor Swift wrote the book? She didn’t write the book!’ And I was laughing because I was like, ‘It’s not true! She didn’t write the book!’ But my daughter was convinced of it.”
Vaughn could not stress enough that this one project Swift was not involved with. He told RS, “There is a real book … and it’s a really good book. And there is an Elly Conway who wrote the book, but it’s not Taylor Swift. And I say that because I imagine Taylor Swift has a load of people trying to jump on her bandwagon left, right, and center, and I don’t want to be a part of that club. I did read the conspiracies and I was like, wow, they don’t leave a stone unturned! But it’s not Taylor Swift. She definitely didn’t write the book.”
It gets better, though. Swift did play a small part in the movie according to the director, who said his daughters with supermodel Claudia Schiffer convinced the couple to buy them a Scottish Fold for Christmas after watching Miss Americana. And that cat, of course, is the one featured in the film.
“Ironically, what she is responsible for is the Scottish Fold,” Vaughn said. “I got home one day, it was Christmas, and I was like, ‘What the f–k is that noise?’ And I’m running around the house and I hear a noise, and the kids had seen a Taylor Swift documentary [Miss Americana] and there was a Scottish Fold in that, and they’d persuaded my wife, Claudia [Schiffer], to get them the kitten for Christmas. It was bought without my permission and hidden from me.”
Watch the Argylle trailer below.