Having gone so long without an official update that a lot of people forgot it even existed to begin with, the marketing campaign for Matthew Vaughn’s incoming spy caper Argylle got off to a strange and very feline-heavy start.
With a full-length trailer set to arrive sooner rather than later, the first teaser that ran for less than a minute was quite literally nothing but Sam Rockwell and Bryce Dallas Howard standing on a rooftop, where he pulls a cat out of nowhere and casually drops it from the top of a tall building.
Suffice to say, we should expect the unexpected from the architect of the off-the-wall Kingsman franchise, but the case of casting the kitty proved to be a lot more troublesome than you’d think. Despite the teaser featuring a cat rendered in questionable CGI, Vaughn admitted to Vanity Fair that he fired the original star and snatched his daughter’s pet for the duration of the shoot as well, with Howard’s Elly bringing her companion everywhere on her adventure.
“When Elly goes on the adventure, she brings the cat with her – and cats aren’t easy. What happened the first day of filming, we had a professional, very expensive acting cat that was useless. So I fired the cat. They don’t have any rights, thank god. And I went home and went up to my daughter’s bedroom and grabbed her cat and said, ‘I’m borrowing this cat for three months.’”
A $200 million globetrotting blockbuster doesn’t sound like the sort of project where its director would be forced to fire a cat on the very first day of shooting, but maybe that’s just a taste of the insanity Argylle has in store.