The Twist-Filled Ending (and Confusing Post-Credits Scene) of Argylle, Explained

The following story contains spoilers, of course, for Argylle (2024).

FOR SEVERAL MONTHS, people heading out to their local movie theater—whether to take in the latest blockbuster, an award-contending high-brown film, or an indie falling somewhere in between—have likely taken in a lot of different trailers. One of those trailers, for director Matthew Vaughn’s spy comedy/thriller Argylle, has become a staple in the rotation as repeat cinemagoers took in the images of Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Henry Cavill with a horrible haircut, and a very cute cat.

At the end of that trailer (the movie only released one during its entire marketing campaign) they were faced with a lingering question, as Samuel L. Jackson’s character asked someone in the film: Are you ready to meet the real Agent Argylle?

As that trailer remained on repeat, audiences kept hearing this same question. And as anything that gets repeated tends to do, it became a meme online. People wondering the answer to the question earnestly were replaced by people trying to come up with the most absurd possible answer and also people reading into the worst instincts of modern blockbuster filmmaking, predicting some kind of cheap cameo or twist.

In the end, despite its subpar Rotten Tomatoes score, Argylle is an entertaining, action-packed, twisty, and mostly fun movie—and one that’s not really worth the meme-ification, mocking, and commotion that people on the internet have made about it, for better and for worse. It’s an entertaining and fairly disposable February release; if you’re looking for a good way to fill 2 hours and 20 minutes over the weekend or after work, you could do far worse.

Anyway. If you’ve seen the movie and are looking for some added clarity, or if you just want to know what the whole deal is with The Real Agent Argylle or anything else, we’ve got the entire lowdown covered just below.

So who is Elly Conway, author of the Argylle books within Argylle, anyway?

Early on in the Argylle era, it was publicized that Matthew Vaughn’s spy thriller was based on a novel of the same name from a first-time author named Elly Conway. An impressive feat for an author with no public history, but not the most far-fetched thing in the world; books get optioned into movies prior to their release all the time, although it tends to happen with authors who have more of an established track record. One example: nonfiction writer Nicholas Pileggi completed his book Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas simultaneously with Martin Scorsese’s Casino, which itself was based on Pileggi’s book. Pileggi’s book was released just shortly before Scorsese’s film in 1995.

So it was very possible, initially, that Elly Conway was just a new author who wrote a banger; a banger that somehow made its way to director Matthew Vaughn, Apple Films, and more. But then, the internet did what the internet does, and began to theorize. Lots of theories about Elly Conway’s identity emerged, the most prominent in recent months being that “Elly Conway” was, in fact, a pseudonym for Taylor Swift. Yes, that Taylor Swift.

No, Elly Conway is not Taylor Swift.

Argylle: A Novel was, in fact, released on January 9, 2024, and the author’s byline reads Elly Conway. But once anyone has even seen the trailer for Argylle, it becomes clear what is going on: Elly Conway is a character in the film, played by Bryce Dallas Howard. She’s a famed novelist with a series of bestselling spy novels—Argylle, depicted in fictional form by Henry Cavill within the film, is her protagonist. And at some point, her novels begin to go from fiction to fact; that’s when she gets tied up with an evil organization called The Division and a spy named Aidan (Sam Rockwell) shows up to help her out.

But that’s all you need to know about Elly Conway—she’s not Taylor Swift, she’s not the Queen of England, and she’s not anyone. She’s a fictional character in the movie Argylle, and the book that was released is a smartly-created bit of tie-in marketing for the movie. Sooner or later, hopefully, we’ll find out who the actual ghostwriter was for Argylle: A Novel.

Got it. So then who’s the real Agent Argylle that I’ve heard so much about?

As people saw the Argylle trailer over and over and over again, theories became more and more common online as to who the real Agent Argylle that the end of the trailer alludes to really is. It’s the cat! It’s a surprise celebrity cameo! It’s the friends we made along the way!

It turns out that the identity of the real Agent Argylle was actually revealed back in 2021 by Observer (and an aggregation Tweet from @DiscussingFilm). It reads: Matthew Vaughn is set to direct a thriller about a best-selling female novelist who turns out to be a world-class spy suffering from amnesia.

That is… not how the trailer sells Argylle! Clearly, at some point the strategy behind the film shifted that story point from the headliner to the core mystery. But movie announcements, we now know, are forever.

This is, indeed, how things play out in the film. While Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) ends up on a fish-out-of-water spy adventure with Aidan (Sam Rockwell), she turns out to not be as out-of-water as it seems when she eventually meets former CIA director Alfie (Samuel L. Jackson), who’s running his own operation to take down the The Division.

Alfie reveals the truth to Elly: her real name is not Elly Conway. The life she thinks she knows is not the life she really lived. In reality, she’s a former spy named Rachel Kylle—or, R. Kylle—and is suffering from extreme amnesia after a mission gone wrong. Her “parents” (Bryan Cranston and Catherine O’Hara) were actually high-ranking Division officials who instilled her with the Elly Conway identity; her novels were a way to get deep-seated spy memories and secrets out of her. All of the adventures we saw between Argylle (Henry Cavill) and Wyatt (John Cena) were actually adventures that Rachel and Aidan were on together.

It takes Rachel/Elly a long time to come to terms with this realization (and this twist happens with plenty of time left in the movie; the movie is not as bad or ridiculous as some may lead you to believe, but it’s definitely too long), but by the third act, she and Aidan team-up for some badass top-notch spy stuff and take The Division—and Elly’s “parents”—down.

So what happens at the end of Argylle?

Much of the movie is spent chasing after something called the “masterkey,” which is a Macguffin in the truest form. Alfie (Jackson) is after it because it can clear his name and expose The Division for some kind of evil secrets… but it’s really just a Macguffin to drive the plot along, not dissimilar from the rand0m and bizarre Rabbit’s Foot in 2006’s Mission Impossible III. It does not matter. Whatever.

Anyway, Rachel and Aidan eventually emerge victorious over The Division, despite Rachel briefly being put into Manchurian Candidate/Winter Soldier mode by her “mother” (who is really an evil psychiatrist). She’s only saved when Keira (Ariana DeBose) enters in full Deus Ex Machina style to kill the bad guys and save the day.

Afterwards, we see that Rachel has gone back to her Elly persona in an attempt to return to her peaceful life (and to release another, potentially final (?) Argylle novel). While reading at an event, though, in an extremely confusing and bizarre turn, a man in a T-shirt with a mullet turns up, and when we see his face it’s… Henry Cavill. And he expects that Elly/Rachel is going to have some questions for him.

So maybe the real Agent Argylle is both R. Kylle and also there’s an Argylle himself out there? This much remains to be seen. Argylle 2? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Wait, does the credits scene mean Argylle is connected to the Kingsmen franchise?

On top of the open-ended actual ending for the movie itself, Argylle also has a mid-credits scene that seems to be both setting something else up and setting the film within a greater Matthew Vaughn universe.

The mid-credits scene opens with a shot of The King’s Man bar—as featured in Vaughn’s Kingsman franchise—and a young man introduces himself as Aubrey Argylle. The actor featured in this sequence is Louis Partridge, who was previously announced to be playing a young Argylle in a prequel series.

So our guess here? It may turn out to be that Argylle is both based on the life of R. Kylle and also based on the life of someone named Aubrey Argylle, who was seen in Henry Cavill form at the end of the film, and as younger Louis Partridge form in the mid-credits scene.

He, somehow, seems to tie in to the Kingsman world, despite the fact that Samuel L. Jackson and Sofia Boutella both appeared in Argylle and already played characters in the first Kingsman movie. But that’s OK. We can work around it. More outrageous things have happened—just in this movie alone.