Matthew Vaughn on Tackling the Spy Genre With ‘Argylle’

Matthew Vaughn as a director is fascinating because his work often can be of two minds. You either think he’s making a commentary on something or you think he’s falling into the same tropes as other films before, there isn’t really an in between. I tend to think that Vaughn is brilliant in his work. The Kingsman movies are some of my favorite films (and they’re why I even have a job here at the Mary Sue). He loves to weave in his own brand of humor and style to his ideas on the spy genre and now we’re getting to see that with Argylle.

Starring Henry Cavill as Argylle himself, the movie explores the world that Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) creates with her writing and what happens when she falls into one of her stories. Getting to talk with Vaughn at New York Comic-Con was a dream come true for me because I really would not be working at the Mary Sue if it weren’t for a screening of Kingsman: The Golden Circle that I went to with a friend. With his previous work in the spy genre, he has made a lot of commentary on how we approach these stories so I asked if he got to tackle anything in Argylle that he might not have had the chance to previously.

“When you see the film, we’re sort of saying that we were guilty of a lot of tropes in Kingsman that we’re now destroying in this film,” he said. “And we’re having a lot of fun with it but if you see the scene, it sums up the movie of ‘okay, this is what everyone thinks spy movies are and what spy movies I’ve made and spy movies I love.’ But there’s a way of, let’s say I’ve been very much more, as you say, the fun spy movies and it’s still fun. But we thought what would happen if John Le Carré or (Robert) Ludlum, a really serious spy writer, crashed into that world? You’d have a weird new balance or sort of chalk and cheese you say. And that’s what we’re doing.”

You can see the rest of our conversation here:

Argylle is in theaters on February 2nd.

(featured image: Apple Original Films)