Celebrity
Taylor Swift Didn't Write Argylle, According To The Film’s Director
Swifties believed the singer had secretly written the novel.
Taylor Swift is a prolific songwriter, performer, and a budding filmmaker, among other things — but she’s not a novelist, as some fans had recently come to believe.
Swifties suspected that the singer was the true author of Argylle, the novel on which the upcoming film is based. (Elly Conway, the ostensible author of Argylle, is believed by many to be a pseudonym.)
But in a Jan. 17 interview with Rolling Stone, Argylle director Matthew Vaughn confirmed that Swift did not write the mysterious book. And in the process, he revealed that his own daughter was briefly convinced by the fan theory.
“I’m not a big internet guy, and it was actually my daughter who came up to me... and said, ‘You never told me Taylor wrote the book!’” Vaughn said. “I’m looking at her going, ‘What are you talking about Taylor Swift wrote the book? She didn’t write the book!’ I was laughing because I was like, ‘It’s not true! She didn’t write the book!’ But my daughter was convinced of it.”
Conway’s identity has been speculated about since Apple paid $200 million to option the novel in August 2021, over two years before it was released — a rare coup for a first-time author. However, there’s little information about her online, with Penguin Random House’s bio simply stating that she “lives somewhere in the United States.”
“There is an Elly Conway who wrote the book, but it’s not Taylor Swift,” Vaughn said. “I imagine Taylor Swift has a load of people trying to jump on her bandwagon left, right, and center, and I don’t want to be a part of that club. I did read the conspiracies and I was like, wow, they don’t leave a stone unturned!”
Why Fans Thought Swift Wrote Argylle
Fans first thought Swift might be Elly Conway after it surfaced that a character of the same name appeared on the Australian soap opera Neighbors — and that character made her debut on Dec. 13, aka Swift’s birthday.
Fans also noted that the movie features a lot of argyle print (which Swift loves), and stars a Scottish Fold cat, the same breed as Swift’s famous felines Olivia Benson and Meredith Grey. In the trailer, the cat is even shown in a similar travel backpack to the one Swift carried in her 2020 Netflix documentary Miss Americana.
The film is a meta take on the book, which features Elly Conway as a character played by Bryce Dallas Howard. Some Swifties thought Howard’s look in Argylle resembled Swift’s redhead character in her “All Too Well” short film. In addition, she loves argyle sweaters, which inspired the movie’s aesthetic.
All these clues ended up being mere coincidence. However, Swift did inspire the cats’ casting — albeit indirectly.
Vaughn’s wife, model Claudia Schiffer, got their daughters a Scottish Fold for Christmas after they watched Miss Americana, and he ended up using their family cat for the film after the cat they’d hired didn’t pan out.
“As crazy as it sounds, that is our only Taylor Swift connection,” he said. “It was odd because he rode to work with me every morning, shared my trailer. But he was great, and he seemed to enjoy it as well. He was a natural. The nepo cat.”
