Argylle ending and post-credits scene explained by director Matthew Vaughn

Watch: Matthew Vaughn reflect on Argylle's post-credit scene

Argylle director Matthew Vaughn hopes to make a movie that combines Argylle with his other espionage franchise: Kingsman.

The Apple TV+ film follows Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), a spy thriller author who is thrust into the world of espionage when a shady organisation vies to get a copy of her next book. The author is able to predict the future, it seems, and spies from around the world are desperately chasing her in order to know what comes next, but not if spy Aidan (Sam Rockwell) has anything to say about it.

Read more: Everything you need to know about Argylle

Argylle is ripe with crossover opportunities, and the film aptly sets it up a way this would be possible through its ending. Before we explain how and why, and Vaughn’s take on the matter, be warned that there are spoilers in this article.

Argylle ending explained

Argylle is full of twists and turns, many centred on Elly who is actually a spy named Rachel Kyle who lost her memory and whose partner, Aidan, has been trying to help her regain them. After doing so, and defeating the bad guys, the character decides that she wants to return to her writing and finish the Argylle series for herself and her fans.

At a book event promoting her final novel in the series it appears that the stage is set to close out the film, however, Vaughn has another surprise in store for fans because Cavill’s Argylle stands up and tells Elly that she “probably has a lot of questions for him”. Argylle, it turns out, is real. Not only is he real, the film’s post-credit scene reveals that he trained as a Kingsman, with Louis Partridge playing a young Aubrey Argylle.

Vaughn explains that it was “definitely” the intention to merge the two universes together, as he tells Yahoo: “At Marv, the company I work for, I would say Kingsman is on the left, Argylle’s very much on the right. And we've got this place in the middle where one day I want these worlds to intersect.”

Howard also comments on the film's surprise ending, though she chose a more cautious approach when asked about it: “One of the things that’s distinctive in this movie is that there’s not one twist, there's eleven twists in this movie.

Read more: Argylle star Bryce Dallas Howard responds to Taylor Swift fan theories

“And many of them are totally unpredictable, and to live in a world where we have so much access to information and spoilers and all of that, to get to view a movie and be like ‘wait, what? Like how did I never see that coming?’ That’s really thrilling and reading the script that’s exactly how I felt… it’s exciting, it’s like a ride, like a rollercoaster ride with twists and turns.”

Her co-star Cranston, who plays villain Ritter, goes on: “Then even after reading it, making the movie, seeing the movie you forget some elements of it and think ‘oh that’s how it’s going to work’, so it’s even fresh for these old eyes.”

Cavill, who is the centre of the big reveal, also felt surprised by the ending, saying: “I think, reading the script the first time, the best thing about it were all the twists and turns, you never really knew what was going to happen. What I liked about it the most was that it was a completely original idea, and we haven’t got many of those, some of these big budget movies are based on IP already and Matthew created his own.”

Argylle is streaming on Apple TV+ from Friday, 12 April