Between the Kingsman movies, Layer Cake, and Kick-Ass, filmmaker Matthew Vaughn has spent a lot of time on undercover operatives, clandestine missions, and flirtatious fighting banter. But with his new film, Argylle—which stars Henry Cavill as the secret agent of the title (or does it?)—Vaughn pokes fun at the stories that made him, both those he created and those he grew up loving.
“I’m guilty of being part of creating a clichéd culture of spies. I just love the idea of doing a spy movie that takes all the tropes and then turns it on its head,” Vaughn tells Vanity Fair for this exclusive early look.
The movie, debuting February 2, emerged from the pandemic lockdown. “I was watching lots of great movies from the past with my kids, because finally I could get them to actually watch films that I wanted,” says Vaughn, who has two daughters and a son with wife Claudia Schiffer. “So I showed them Charade and North by Northwest and then Romancing the Stone—all these fun movies that you think you know where you are, and then you don’t know where you are.”
What at first appears to be a straightforward spy thriller, featuring Cavill’s Agent Argylle in a seductive showdown with a femme fatale played by Dua Lipa, actually turns out to be a scene from a best-selling book written by Bryce Dallas Howard’s character: an introverted novelist named Elly Conway who has a robust imagination for intrigue despite being a devout homebody.
“She’s the J.K. Rowling of spy books. She’s agoraphobic. Her idea of a hot date is staying at home, writing more of her book, with her cat for company,” Vaughn says. “She’s not a victim, because she’s really successful and really funny and really smart, but she has issues.”
Fiction and reality begin to merge when the author is targeted by various deadly figures from the underground world of espionage, all because her seemingly fanciful new book has inadvertently described some true-life incidents. One secret agent becomes her protector, but he looks like Sam Rockwell rather than Henry Cavill—a charming everyman if not a square-jawed superhero.