Nepo kitty: Director Matthew Vaughn cast his cat in Argylle, who becomes the movie’s breakout star

NEW YORK – The spy comedy-thriller Argylle has a star-studded cast that includes Henry Cavill, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Bryan Cranston, John Cena and Samuel L. Jackson.

But the breakout star is Chip, a tomcat belonging to English director Matthew Vaughn, his German supermodel wife Claudia Schiffer and their daughter Clementine, who freely admit their family pet is a “nepo kitty”, or beneficiary of Hollywood nepotism.

Chip features prominently in the film, which opens in Singapore cinemas on Feb 1. It follows the reclusive Elly Conway (Howard), the best-selling author of a book series about a secret agent named Argylle (Cavill) and his nemesis Legrange (played by English pop singer Dua Lipa in her first major film role).

When Elly’s novels begin mirroring the activities of a real-life underground syndicate, she and her beloved cat Alfie (Chip) find themselves swept up in a world of espionage and embarking on a life-and-death race around the globe.

Vaughn, the 52-year-old film-maker behind the Kingsman spy comedies (2014 to 2021) and superhero movies X-Men: First Class (2011) and Kick-A** (2010), had no problems assembling a human cast for Argylle.

But he hit a speed bump when it came to finding the right feline.

“On the first day of filming, we had a very expensive and terrible cat actor and it really annoyed me,” Vaughn says after previewing a clip of the film at an event in New York in late 2023.

“So I fired the cat, went to my daughter and just grabbed Chip and said, ‘I’m borrowing Chip for three months’,” he says, referring to 19-year-old Clementine, one of his three children with Schiffer, 53.

Vaughn knew he needed a charismatic kitty for the part.

“The cat’s a big character in the movie – it’s in it all the way through. Cats are quite divisive, and this cat wins over dog lovers,” he says.

Chip is a male Scottish Fold, a photogenic breed with large eyes, a rounded face and folded ears.

Clementine had begged her parents for one after seeing singer-songwriter Taylor Swift’s two Scottish Folds, Meredith Grey and Olivia Benson, in Miss Americana, the 2020 documentary film about the American pop star.

And Chip is now a star in his own right.

He recently unveiled his first novel, Blue Chip: Confessions Of Claudia Schiffer’s Cat, and has a fast-growing Instagram following (19,000 followers and counting) at @chipthecat, where his bio describes him as an “author, model, entrepreneur, influencer and nepo kitty”.

Chip is also a natural in front of the camera and seemed to enjoy being on the Argylle set, although Vaughn admits it was a bigger hassle than he had anticipated.

“I didn’t think it through – driving to work every day with a cat and then having the cat in my trailer.

“And the only person the cat wanted to be handled by was me, so I spent half the day directing, half the day being a cat handler,” he recalls.

At Argylle’s world premiere in London last week, Chip stole the show on the red carpet, carried by Schiffer in the same argyle-print backpack he travels in in the film.

Gesturing at a giant movie poster of Chip above his head at Leicester Square, Vaughn says: “It is surreal seeing my cat up there.”

The movie itself is a meta, tongue-in-cheek take on the spy genre. Co-produced by Apple Studios, it will also be available to stream on Apple TV+ later in 2024.

Cavill, 40, says his fictional secret agent is “the idealised version of a spy, with all the spy tropes but turned up to 11”.

“Clearly, the character is not to be taken too seriously even though he takes himself seriously, and it all ties with the tone of the movie,” says the English actor, who appeared in spy movies such as Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018) and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), and played Superman in Man Of Steel (2013) and other DC Extended Universe films.

Vaughn describes the plot as the equivalent of “what would happen if a wizard went to (Harry Potter author) J.K. Rowling and said, ‘Wizards are real, Hogwarts is real, I’m going to show you what it’s really like’, and they go on an adventure”.

“And we thought, ‘We’ll do that with spies’.”

Vaughn also wanted to poke fun at his own Kingsman movies (2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service and its 2017 sequel The Golden Circle, and the 2021 prequel The King’s Man), a modern take on espionage thrillers that blended action and comedy.

“We were guilty of a lot of tropes in Kingsman that we’re now destroying in this film,” the director says.