While much of the Argo operation has been declassified, Ben Affleck took a number of artistic licenses for the sake of his story.
- Lee Schatz escaped separately from the rest of the group and actually stayed at the Swedish embassy before later arriving at the Canadian consulate at the end of November. Another group of staff made an escape but were soon captured. In addition, the Anders group was cut off by a crowd of protestors and spent almost a week going from house to house to evade capture.
- The British and New Zealand diplomats are explicitly stated to have refused to help their American colleagues; in reality, they both offered help. The British actually hosted the Americans for a short time, before it was decided it was safer for them to be with the Canadians. In addition, a New Zealander drove the Americans to the airport and another coached them on the roles.
- Most of the tensest scenes in the movie — the location scout, the CIA brass trying to kill the plan, the nail-biting escape from the airport — didn't happen.
- Since the CIA didn't try to kill the plan once Mendez was in Tehran, the Canadian ambassador never suggested destroying the passports and abandoning the plan; this last part annoyed folks in Canada (see America Saves the Day).
- The movie portrays Mendez as estranged from his wife and living alone in a tiny garret, subsisting on leftover Chinese takeout; in real life, Mendez was a successful artist (he had started at the CIA as document forger, as referenced in an early scene where he's creating a fake Soviet passport) who lived with his wife and their children on a converted farm in Virginia.
- After Mendez and the six fly out, the CIA agents decide that they'll give the credit to the Canadians in order to protect the remaining hostages. In reality, the six were taken to a safe house in Switzerland and it was intended for them to be held at an undisclosed location in Florida until the hostage crisis was resolved; for diplomatic reasons, the Americans had publicly maintained that all of the embassy staff were accounted for and being held hostage. Then a Canadian newspaper broke the story, though American involvement remained classified.
- The Argo script was selected by John Chambers, not Mendez.
- Argo wasn't a rejected script for a godawful Star Wars rip-off as the film suggests, but an in-production (albeit stagnant) film loosely adapting the 1967 sci-fi novel Lord of Light, which actually pre-dated Star Wars.Essentially... To be fair, they were both Science Fantasy stories about a space rebellion with themes of eastern religious mysticism (Taoism for Star Wars, Hinduism and Buddhism for Lord of Light).
- Jack Kirby wasn't commissioned for the fake Argo movie. His conceptual artwork had already existed from the aborted but serious attempt to film Lord of Light.
- The setup for the film was more low key, there was no read-through with actors in costume. Posters, a story in a magazine, business cards, and a telephone number were it. The number was in fact called by the Iranians, but before the 6 were evacuated.
- Mendez was not sent alone to Iran; he had several assistants.
- In the film, Mendez and the passengers barely make it through the checkpoint and onto the plane before the Iranian guards discover the ruse and run to try and catch the departing flight, ending with them chasing it down a runway in several vehicles. In real life, the passengers went through the airport without incident, and were never spotted or suspected during their time there. The exit was also done at 5am, as it was expected that security would be more lax at such an early hour. One of the real-life persons involved, Robert Anders (played by Tate Donovon), recalled
that he had to go through less security in Tehran in 1980, than in Toronto in 2012 to come see the film. However, the film does not mention the mechanical failure suffered by the real aircraft Mendez and the group left on. - Mendez actually came to Tehran with several escape scenarios, and the final one was chosen by the groups themselves.
- The group were not holed up in the Canadian ambassador's home, they stayed at two different places and they did move about the city, although rarely.
