It has been revealed that Taylor Swift was a huge inspiration for the action film Argylle, which will hit cinemas on February 1st.
Speaking to Graham Norton on his show, lead actress Bryce Dallas-Howard revealed how the Bad Blood singer inspired her character.
The actress plays Elly Conway in the movie, an introverted spy novelist who rarely leaves her home.
Bryce also shut down the viral Taylor Swift-Argylle conspiracy theory which suggested that the popstar wrote the book seeing as it was released under an alias.
The 42-year-old told Graham: “We can’t pretend she was involved, but the reality is she was in many ways a great inspiration.”
“She is a cat lady. She’s got this awesome backpack with a cat in [it] that she walks around with. She loves a good argyle sweater, and there is a sort of unapologetic dorkiness about her,”
“That’s a little bit like what my character is like,” she explained.
Taylor, 34, is known for her “easter egg” hints that she teases in the months coming up to an album release, and when the trailer dropped for this movie her fans believed she was involved.
One of the “hints” fans noticed was that Bryce’s character has a Scottish Fold cat which is similar to the singer’s famous feline Meredith Grey.
The cat in the film can also be seen being carried around in a specially designed argyle-patterned backpack with a window, identical to the one Taylor uses in her Netflix documentary Miss Americana.
Another theory included fans pointing out Bryce’s curly red hair and how it is similar to the red wig Taylor wore to play a writer in her All Too Well: The Short Film.
The Argylle director Matthew Vaughn has also shut down rumours that the singer was involved in the film in any way, during an interview with Rolling Stone.
The director said: “It’s a really good book, and there is an Elly Conway who wrote the book, but it’s not Taylor Swift. And I say that because I imagine Taylor Swift has a load of people trying to jump on her bandwagon left, right and centre 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!’ but it’s not Taylor Swift. She definitely didn’t write the book.”
The star-studded cast of this new spy movie also includes Dua Lipa, Henry Cavill, John Cena and Sam Rockwell to name a few.
According to IMDb’s synopsis of Argylle, it follows the main character “Elly Conway, an introverted spy novelist who seldom leaves her home, as is drawn into the real world of espionage when the plots of her books get a little too close to the activities of a sinister underground syndicate.”
“When Aiden, a spy, shows up to save her (he says) from being kidnapped or killed (or both), Elly and her beloved cat Alfie are plunged into a covert world where nothing, and no one, is what it seems.”
