Argylle might be bombing, but at least its fake author mystery has been solved
No, Taylor Swift did not write the "real" Argylle novel
[Note: This article contains no spoilers for the plot of the movie Argylle; we read a plot synopsis of it online, but honestly aren’t confident we followed it well enough to meaningfully spoil it.]
Although it’s currently staring down the barrel of a far more taxing mystery—i.e., “How do you survive making a $200 million action-comedy and having it only bring in $6.5 million on opening day?”—at least one conundrum surrounding Matthew Vaughn’s new film Argylle has now been solved: The question of its seemingly non-existent author.
You might recall this from a few months back, but question marks began cropping up around Argylle’s authorship pretty early on, after online detectives noticed that the writer Vaughn had supposedly optioned for his new spy comedy, Elly Conway, was a first-time writer with essentially no online history. When the first trailer for the movie revealed that “Elly Conway” was Bryce Dallas Howard’s character in the film, an author dragged into a spy adventure seemingly based on her books, the gag was pretty clear, but it still left a question: Was there going to be an actual Argylle book, and if so… Who the hell was actually writing it?
But while there were bizarre fan theories that the author might have been Taylor Swift—which immediately took on a terrible and deadly weight, such is the gravity exerted by Swift’s fanbase on the pop culture universe—the answer has now been revealed, and it’s pretty prosaic: The “real” Elly Conway is a combination of authors Terry Hayes (I Am Pilgrim) and Tammy Cohen (When She Was Bad). The project actually started as an attempt by Vaughn to adapt Hayes’ best-selling thriller Pilgrim, but when MGM refused to sell him the rights to the book, the pair decided to concoct a brand new spy story of their own, bringing in Cohen to help pen the novel (Which is, apparently, still coming out, and will presumably be running at some pretty House Of Leaves-esque levels of meta.)
All of which might be fairly moot, if Argylle turns out to be the bomb it’s potentially shaping up to be; when your writer and director are having more fun cooking up fake authors than your audience is having watching your movie, you might be in trouble.