SPY GAMES

James Bond would need a nice sit-down after watching Argylle, a super-spy movie that explodes with crazed ideas, mischievous twists and truly bonkers action as it turns the genre inside out. Total Film’s mission? To interrogate director Matthew Vaughn and stars Henry Cavill and Bryce Dallas Howard as to, well, WTF?

Matthew Vaughn is sitting in his study, twisting his head from side to side, the peak of his cap slicing and slashing. The director of Kick-Ass and the Kingsman trilogy is frantically looking for Chip. You know Chip. Everyone does. He’s the cat in Vaughn’s new spy thriller Argylle. That’s right, the impossibly cute furball who peers out the window of Bryce Dallas Howard’s designer carrier, then finds himself variously hurled out of a train, parachuting through the sky and plummeting off a building as the action kicks in. Chip, or Alfie as he’s named in the movie, was an instant internet sensation, threatening to become cinema’s most celebrated feline since Jonesy padded around the USCSS Nostromo. And he belongs to Vaughn’s wife, Claudia Schiffer.

‘Chip’s not here,’ concedes Vaughn with a sigh. ‘Sometimes he comes in for a cameo.’ But before you go thinking this is some nepo cat, you should know that Chip actually saved the day when the pro cat failed to shine. ‘We had an acting cat on the first day, and… I don’t know. It was very expensive, and, as far as I could tell, it was just a cat. So I was like, “This isn’t going to work.” Cue Chip. ‘It’s my wife’s cat, but also my daughter’s. I’m a dog person. I grabbed him. I said, “I need to borrow Chip.” I didn’t think it through, because it’s a bit weird, sharing a car at six in the morning with a cat. The cat’s sitting next to me in the trailer.’ He shakes his head resignedly. ‘I was the cat handler, bringing it onto set. As I said, I’m not a big cat person,

but by the end of it, I fell in love with this cat. The cat’s fucking incredible. He actually steals the bloody movie. It’s ridiculous. Soon, I’m going to be doing talk shows and I’m going to give Blofeld a fucking run for his money.’

Sharing the screen with Chip are Bryce Dallas Howard, Henry Cavill and Sam Rockwell, and, in smaller roles, Bryan Cranston, Ariana DeBose, Dua Lipa, Samuel L. Jackson, John Cena, Catherine O’Hara and Sofia Boutella. A stacked cast, which is what happens when everyone wants to work with a director. And when said director personally sends you a script the like of which you’ve never seen before.

‘You can’t anticipate what to expect,’ says Howard. ‘You can’t predict where things go.’ Cavill agrees. ‘There are many, many twists and turns, and it makes it exciting. There are millions of scripts out there, so it’s really nice to read something where you go, “Oh, it’s different.” It keeps it interesting, rather than just the same old, same old.’

It’s hard to think of another movie with so many twists and turns. Classic film noirs like The Big Sleep and Out of the Past, perhaps. Vaughn mentions mystery thriller Charade, with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. It’s one of his favourites, and a key influence on Argylle, along with action adventure Romancing the Stone, Bond movies, obviously, and 80s action flicks like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon.

‘You’re thinking, “Oh, what? Oh, fuck. Oh, hey?” grins Vaughn of Charade, before considering his own movie’s giddy plotting. ‘I was like, “Well, fuck it. If you’re on a rollercoaster, you want to go up, down, sideways, and own it.” The studio was like, “Oh, well, maybe it’s too many?” I was like, “Fuck it. How can you have too many? That’s the fun of this movie. Let’s just go for it.”’

LITERARY AGENT

As to just what all this bedlam is about, let’s stick to the slightest of setups in order to keep the surprises intact. Below is no more than you’ll discover by watching the first trailer, which is all taken from the first 28 minutes of the movie.

The cyclone plot revolves around Elly Conway (Howard), an author of a series of spy novels that follow the intrepid adventures of the impossibly suave Agent Argylle (Cavill) and his partner Wyatt (John Cena). Only Elly’s latest page-turner has touched upon some top-secret truths in the real world of espionage, and suddenly she finds herself the target of syndicate boss Ritter (Bryan Cranston). Enter Aiden Wilde (Sam Rockwell), a good-guy spy who might not look like the Argylle in Elly’s mind’s eye, but certainly packs his fight moves. One minute our introverted novelist is tapping keys and smiling politely at book signings, the next she’s whisked off around the globe, with killer goons looking to stamp her ticket at every turn. Meanwhile, Vaughn and screenwriter Jason Fuchs (Pan, Wonder Woman) find clever ways to flit between this real-world action and the fictional adventures of Argylle, with the twin stories circling and paralleling and entwining one another to dizzying effect.

It’s all mega complicated, or rather meta complicated, for this movie is actually based on a novel by Elly Conway, with Fuchs and Vaughn turning it inside out by putting the actual author into the story – think a bemused Stephen King wandering the corridors of the Overlook Hotel. Oh, and Conway may or may not be real. She’s a mystery. Her biography on Penguin Random House says she was born and raised in upstate New York, and wrote Argylle ‘while working as a waitress in a late-night diner’. It sounds like something out of a movie, and there is speculation that Elly Conway is a pen name, with one theory having it that the actual writer is – wait for it – Taylor Swift. According to certain conspiracy theorists, the aforementioned cat Alfie is actually inspired by one of the singersongwriter’s own beloved kitties, Meredith Grey.

No one’s going to discuss the Conway speculation now. But if the author isn’t real, then Vaughn’s playing a strong hand of poker, leafing through the manuscript of her next novel as he chats to Total Film. Heck, even without the Conway conundrum, it’s a fiendishly dicey affair to chat about Argylle, for no-one wants to spoil the corkscrew plotting. Or, put another way, to let the cat out the bag.

‘This is my first interview… I’m almost looking to you to thread this needle,’ pleads Howard. ‘How do you declare to everyone, “Hey we’re throwing a party. We can’t give you the agenda to the party, but it’s going to be insane! You’re not going to want to miss this party! But we can’t tell you why!”’

OK, let’s start with basics – how Howard and Cavill got invited to the party in the first place. Both, it turns out, have long been on Vaughn’s radar. In Howard’s case, she read for the lead in the director’s 2007 movie Stardust. ‘She gave the best audition,’ recalls Vaughn, ‘and I rang up Paramount and was like, “Oh my God, we’ve found Yvaine. She’s amazing.” Paramount went, “No, she’s not famous enough.” They wouldn’t let me cast her.’ Vaughn’s wanted to work with her ever since.

DATE

MOVIE Matthew Vaughn on why he’s tamed down his signature violence…

‘I wanted to make the ultimate date movie. It’ll be out just before Valentine’s Day. When we test-screened it… I don’t know if this is an insult or a compliment, but one of the anonymous things went, “This is the first Matthew Vaughn movie I feel comfortable sharing with my wife.”

‘I went to see Romancing the Stone on a date. I was very young and inexperienced, and I didn’t know what to do. And somebody said, “Always go on a date to the cinema, because then you don’t have to talk. I was like, “I fucking like that idea.” I went in thinking I would be bored out of mind, and I’d pretend to like it, and then I’d have something to talk about. And I loved it more than her. So I had a movie that we both enjoyed, and I got my first kiss. It was a bloody good night.

‘Right now, everyone needs a warm hug, and we need to feel happy. I’m hoping that people will come out and just appreciate that Argylle is warm. It’s a ray of sunshine in a very dark world.

‘But we had to cut a lot of stuff out to go PG-13. I couldn’t help myself on the set. And there was a little bit of me where I thought, “Fuck it, should we splat his head at the end? You see everyone’s face, and then – boom – you see his head explode like a watermelon. And then everyone’s going, ‘What the fuck just happened?”’ JG

As for Cavill, it was even easier. ‘He’s a lovely man, and I’m getting to the age where I want to work with people that I get on with,’ shrugs Vaughn. Really, that’s it? ‘With this movie, a lot of it is taking tropes and turning them on their head,’ he elaborates. ‘I needed someone that, when he walks in the room, it’s like, “OK, it’s a superspy. I get it.” So the journey just begins immediately, and sets it in a place for us to then start changing and rearranging shit. It’s shorthand. It makes the movie 10 minutes fucking shorter. You know, Bowie said he was an instant star – just add water and stir. That’s what I’m getting from Cavill.’

Vaughn laughs. ‘And he can rock a flattop. I know a lot of people are like, “What’s the point of that stupid haircut?” I’m like, “Watch the movie. Trust me, when I was a kid, we thought Ivan Drago looked fucking cool. So fuck you.”’

‘Matthew came up with it, and said, “Look, trust me, I can make it look good,’ says Cavill of his heroic hairdo. ‘You know what? You don’t just wake up and have a flattop. It takes work. I don’t know if I have the time or the patience for that kind of carry-on when it comes to my hair, in real life.’

Agent Argylle is a far cry from real life. Most movies, of course, romanticise the notion of spies to begin with. But this one especially so. Our handsome hero is straight out the pages of a glossy bestseller. Such perfection is impossible to maintain. Heck, even for erstwhile Superman Cavill, there must have been days where playing such a fantasy figure was a stretch.

‘You mean every day?’ he chuckles. ‘It’s called “acting” for a reason. You go in there, do your thing, and hope that you pull it off. It’s a fun character to play, though. I mean, if characters have flaws, obviously there’s more to do with them. So someone so idealised becomes slightly more difficult, because how do you make it interesting? A flattop certainly helps.’

AND… ACTION!

Making Argylle was not without its travails. For starters, it shot between August 2021 and January 2022, when movie productions were tightly

constrained by COVID-19 regulations. As you’d expect, Vaughn is typically frank: ‘Making a movie where we’re all wearing masks is fucking weird. You’re giving direction, and they’re like, “What?” And you’re like, “Fuck it. Hold on. I’ll take it down.” [Mimes pulling mask down] ‘La la la la la.’ [Mimes putting mask back up] “You’re not allowed to take your mask down!” “But he can’t understand what I’m fucking saying!”’

Then, tragically, there was the death of Brad Allan of a heart attack, aged 48. The Australian martial artist, stunt performer, actor and action choreographer was an industry legend, having worked on the Jackie Chan Stunt Team and such Hollywood behemoths as Pacific Rim, Wonder Woman and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

Allan had hugely contributed to Vaughn’s previous movies Kick-Ass and the Kingsman trilogy, and his pre-production work on Argylle will stand as his final gift to the movies. Its innovation is invigorating.

‘Watching the same fucking action sequence from another movie is boring,’ sighs Vaughn. ‘I went, “I love dance, cinema, pop video, ballet. OK, let’s do that.”’ There are set pieces here, shot in-camera, that you’ve never seen on screen before. OK, so John Woo’s gun battles are balletic and Edgar Wright choreographed car chases to music in Baby Driver, but these take it further. In one sequence, Rockwell’s background in dance is put to good use. In another, there’s death, and lots of it, by ice skating.

‘I grew up in the 80s where we had to watch fucking ice skating on a Sunday because we had nothing else to watch,’ recalls Vaughn. ‘Torvill and fucking Dean. Boléro. I remember thinking “wow” when they started doing the spinning and stuff. I was like, “That’s fucking lethal and cool.” I thought of a woman using a blade in the style of ice skating. That’s where that came from. It was fucking hard to pull off, I’ve got to tell you. Bryce did as much as possible. Dancing on Ice, eat your fucking heart out.’

‘I love shooting action. Love it. Love it. LOVE IT!’ hollers Howard. ‘I’ve done Jurassic and Spider-Man and Twilight and Terminator. Matthew’s been a part of a new movement over the last 15 or so years where action has got to a completely different level.’ Vaughn’s told Total Film that she’s a black belt at judo… ‘I’m not UNIVERSAL

ARGYLLE

a black belt! I’m close to it. When I was a kid, karate was my life. Training for stunts makes me very excited. This movie is spectacular!’

It’s also, in typical Vaughn style, cheekily funny. Who else would stop an action scene halfway through so that his leading lady could remove her shoes to enable her to run properly? It’s surely a wink to Heelgate, which followed fast on the, well, heels of the release of Jurassic World, when Howard’s character, Claire Dearing, runs from the dinosaurs in Sam Edelman high heel pumps.

Howard cracks up. ‘Oh goodness! I’m going to be boring here. This was a choice made on assessing what the character would do in that moment. It had to do with stealth, as that was the set piece.’ Hmmm. ‘But after the fact, my publicist saw the movie and I was like, “Oh my God, I didn’t even realise that! That’s wild!”’

Wild is a word that Cavill affectionately and appreciatively applies to Vaughn. ‘Matthew’s an outside-the-box thinker,’ he says. ‘Anything that he brings is going to be different from your usual fare. It’s refreshing. And the stunt team was absolutely fantastic. They came up with some really, really interesting and new things.’

The good news is that Vaughn’s only just warming up. Should Argylle succeed in the director’s mission to get audiences invested in

‘THERE ARE MANY, MANY TWISTS AND TURNS AND IT MAKES IT EXCITING’

HENRY CAVILL

Catherine O’Hara and Ariana DeBose (below) are also in on the action new IP built on kamikaze storytelling and gonzo action, he has the next two movies lined up. They will be based on forthcoming novels by Taylor Swift… sorry, Elly Conway. And while this movie was his own meta-mischief take on the material, the next ones will cleave closer to the books.

‘Book one is about: how did Argylle become a spy? That will be the next film. And then Argylle 2 is – I don’t want to give it all away, but there’s the young Argylle, and that becomes Henry, because Henry loves the idea of doing a proper Argylle movie as well.’

‘It’s a fun character,’ says Cavill – who, by the way, doesn’t think that his playing Argylle keeps him from possibly being the next James Bond (‘Whether I’m ruled out of Bond because of this or not is up to Barbara Broccoli and Mr. Wilson,’ he says).

Howard is also on board, should Elly be needed. ‘Oh, absolutely,’ she starts, but won’t say a word more for fear of spoilers. If you want to find out, you’ll need to support Argylle in theatres.

‘Everybody complains there’s not enough original stuff, but it’s because they don’t go see it,’ says Vaughn. ‘People have got to buy tickets first, or there won’t be fucking anything.’

ARGYLLE OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 2 FEBRUARY.