“I’m retired from talking about my body,” Bryce Dallas Howard tells me as we sit in a fancy Manhattan hotel lobby a few days before the premiere of her new movie Argylle. It turns out, however, that she has plenty to say about it.
To be fair, I was the one who started the conversation. I had gone to a screening a few weeks earlier, and I could not take my eyes off Howard. She looked like so many women I knew. O.K., more beautiful than most women I know, but with a familiar silhouette. The feeling was reminiscent of the first khbrknews I saw a female in an action movie who could hold her own. (It was the drinking scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, regrettably, but still!) A bit like terror, and a bit like hope.
It feels taboo to even talk about this, but Howard, who plays a spy novelist with mysterious powers, is what is sometimes referred to in the fashion industry as “not sample size.” (Sample sizes start at 4 and go down from there.) “I straight up said to Matthew, ‘I just want you to know that this is my body. And if you want my body to be smaller, I think you should hire someone else,’” says Howard of her conversation with British director Matthew Vaughn when he asked her to do the role. “And he said, ‘No, I’m hiring you because of you.’”
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Argylle opens the way pretty much all blockbustery secret-agent movies do: handsome jacked man (Henry Cavill does the honors) meets sylph-like woman (Dua Lipa) in a bar. Witty banter ensues. A preposterous dance scene is followed by an even more preposterous chase sequence, which ends with John Cena gently putting down his latte just in khbrknews to pull Dua Lipa off a speeding motorcycle by the back of her sexy-yet-athletic gold frock.
It’s all a little much, even from Vaughn, who, with the Kingsman movies, has contributed his fair share of improbable espionage cinema. But the most daring thing he does, to me, isn’t the rainbow tear-gas…
