Taylor Swift Is the Reason Argylle’s Biggest Draw Is in the Film

Taylor Swift may not have penned Argylle‘s script, but Matthew Vaughn’s spy comedy nevertheless owes its most talked about character to the superstar singer-songwriter.

That’s according to Vaughn himself, who revealed in a recent interview with Collider that Swift’s documentary Miss Americana directly inspired cat Alfie’s key role in Argylle.

“Well, basically in the first draft, there was no cat in the film,” he explained. “Oh sorry, I take that back, there was a cat in the first scene, and then [protagonist Elly Conway] goes on the adventure and leaves the cat behind. And I was working on the script with Jason [Fuchs], and I said, ‘Jason, they’ve gotta have more conflict, but it’s gotta be a fun conflict between these two characters. Otherwise, it’s hard to go from A to Z.'”

“And then I saw the Taylor Swift thing, the cat backpack, whatever you call the thing,” Vaughn continued. “And that made me laugh and I went, ‘Oh my God, I can put a cat in the back of that, and they can go on this whole adventure and argue over the cat.’ So that’s where it came from. For me, it was weirdly a dramatic narrative conflicting device, and then it’s this much bigger thing.”

Alfie is arguably Argylle’s most powerful marketing tool despite its star-studded cast. Bryce Dallas Howard heads up the project as Elly, appearing opposite the likes of Henry Cavill, Sam Rockwell, Samuel L. Jackson, Catherine O’Hara, John Cena, and Dua Lipa.

It remains to be seen if even an adorable feline will be enough to overcome the flick’s negative early reviews, though. Argylle currently holds a 38% review score on Rotten Tomatoes based on 111 reviews. Common criticisms of the movie involve its runtime and CGI.

Argylle arrives in cinemas on Feb. 2.