Taylor Swift may not have written the book that inspired the new movie Argylle, but she shares many similarities with the film’s protagonist, played by Bryce Dallas Howard.
“We can’t pretend she was involved,” Howard, 42, explained on the Friday, January 26, episode of The Graham Norton Show. “The reality is she was in many ways a great inspiration.”
Howard portrays pseudonymous author Elly Conway in the Matthew Vaughn–directed film. The action movie follows Elly as she teams up with Sam Rockwell‘s spy, Aiden, to take down a covert organization after her Argylle book series begins to mirror actual events. Henry Cavill also stars as the fictional agent Argylle alongside Dua Lipa, John Cena, Bryan Cranston, Samuel L. Jackson, Ariana DeBose and Catherine O’Hara.
Joining Elly on her adventure is her adorable cat, played by Vaughn and wife Claudia Schiffer’s real-life pet, Chip. On Friday, Howard pointed out that Elly’s relationship with her furry friend is very similar to that of Swift’s dynamic with her three cats, Meredith Grey, Olivia Benson and Benjamin Button, all of whom are named after fictional characters.
“She is a cat lady. She’s got this awesome backpack with a cat in [it] that she walks around with,” Howard said. “She loves a good argyle sweater, and there is a sort of unapologetic dorkiness about her. That’s a little bit like what my character is like.”
Swift’s name has been floating around the film in recent months after fans began to theorize that the pop star was actually the real Conway, who wrote the novel on which Argylle is based. Little is known about the author, as her Penguin Random House bio states that she was “born and raised in upstate New York” and “wrote her first novel about Agent Argylle while working as a waitress in a late-night diner.”
Some suspected Swift, 34, published the novel under a different name, having previously worked on projects using fake monikers. She cowrote the 2016 Rihanna and Calvin Harris track “This Is What You Came For” under the name Nils Sjöberg.
More clues that added to Swifties’ Argylle theories included the character of Elly’s love of cats and that Conway shared her first Instagram post on December 13, 2022, a.k.a. Swift’s birthday.
Earlier this month, Vaughn, 52, told Rolling Stone that his daughter, Clementine, 19, confronted him about the Swift theories. “I’m looking at her going, ‘What are you talking about Taylor Swift wrote the book? She didn’t write the book!’” he said. “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.”
He went on to confirm that Conway is, in fact, a real person, stating, “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.”
In another interview with Variety, Vaughn joked that he hopes Conway will eventually “come out of the shadows because this Taylor Swift thing freaked me out.”
Argylle premieres in theaters on Friday, February 2.
