Argylle trailer confirms we were totally right about its "official story" being super-suspicious
More than a year ago, online detectives noticed there was something weird going on with Henry Cavill's new movie
Universal Pictures released the first trailer for its new spy thriller Argylle early this morning, which is presumably a big deal for fans of Kingsman director Matthew Vaughn, who’s returning to directing after last helming The King’s Man in 2021. But it’s also a big deal for people who like it when we are right—i.e., us—because it confirms that we were, in fact, totally and completely right when we pointed out about a year ago that there was something extremely goddamn suspicious about this movie when details about it first started rolling out.
Flash back to September 2022, when online detectives started noticing that there was something slightly off about the backstory being presented for what was being billed as a Henry Cavill spy thriller—and specifically, with the author of its source novel, a first-time writer by the name of Elly Conway. Despite having an Instagram page, and a (very short) bio on Penguin Books, there was no other information available about Conway, who had supposedly sold the rights to her as-yet uncompleted first book to Vaughn on the basis of an “early draft manuscript.” At the time, we couldn’t do much more than speculate, writing that, “We have no idea what the actual answer here is—Weird metafictional twist? Celebrity author pseudonym? Boring old reality?” And that’s why we’re geniuses, because “weird metafictional twist” is exactly what this whole thing was!
Which you’d know, if you watched the trailer for Arglle, which opens as a typical spy movie in which Henry Cavill has very sharp hair—only to have the curtain yanked away to reveal that it’s actually a novel being written by Bryce Dallas Howard, who is playing, you guessed it, Elly Conway! We’re deep in meta territory here, as Howard gets rescued from evil spies by Sam Rockwell, because it turns out that she’s very good at predicting spy stuff with her novels. (Also, there’s a lot of cat comedy, for them’s that likes it.) The trailer teases some whole other mystery surrounding the “real” Argylle, but honestly, we’re so pumped about being right about this first thing that we can’t even be bothered to go 2-for-2.
Argylle co-stars John Cena, Bryan Cranston, Catherine O’Hara, and Samuel L. Jackson; it arrives in theaters in February.