Rolex GMT Master "Pepsi" worn on screen

Eight characters, eight decades, one bezel. It's shown up on a Bond girl's wrist in 1964 and on primetime NBC fifty years later, on a colonel gone mad in the jungle and a magazine writer lying to the entire country. One of them sold for over five million dollars. None of them are wearing the same watch by accident.

Nick Dunne wears the same Rolex through the entire decade of his marriage, in flashback and in present day, right up until the wife he's accused of murdering. The watch is a GMT-Master II reference 16710 with the aluminum Pepsi bezel on a brushed Oyster bracelet, running the automatic caliber 3185 in a 40mm case rated to 100 meters, produced from 1989 to 2007, the last GMT-Master II before Rolex switched to ceramic. New around 2005 it would have run about $4,000. Fincher's camera lingers on it constantly, which makes the one scene where Nick swaps it out, for the watch his wife gave him, that his own sister says he hates, land harder than it should. Used examples today go for $10,000 to $15,000. It's the one thing about Nick that never changes, in a story about a man who turns out to be almost entirely performance.

Everyone remembers Connery's Submariner from Goldfinger. Almost nobody remembers that Pussy Galore, Goldfinger's personal pilot and leader of an all-female flying squadron, wears the more precisely cast watch in the film. It's a Rolex GMT-Master reference 6542, the very first GMT-Master Rolex ever built, developed with Pan American Airways in 1954 for pilots tracking two time zones at altitude. No crown guards, since the case was based on the smaller Turn-O-Graph, and a glossy gilt dial from before Rolex went matte. Early examples like this one carried a Bakelite bezel with radium lume, discontinued by 1956 once the material started cracking. Collectors have nicknamed the reference "Pussy Galore" ever since, and surviving examples with original Bakelite now run $20,000 to $25,000. A year after the film, Vogue put co-star Tania Mallet on its cover in the same watch, one of the earliest photographed cases of a woman wearing a men's 40mm sport Rolex.

Everyone on the Bellafonte is broke, and everyone wears a cheap Russian dive watch to prove it. Ned Plimpton, the Kentucky Air National Guard pilot who thinks Zissou might be his father, wears a Rolex GMT-Master II reference 16710 with the Pepsi bezel, a genuinely correct choice for a pilot given the GMT was built with Pan Am for exactly that job. The automatic caliber 3185 runs in a 40mm case rated to 100 meters, produced from 1989 to 2007, used today for $10,000 to $14,000. Bill Murray's Zissou wears a Vostok Amphibia that cost a fraction of that, custom dialed for the shoot and later reissued as the Vostok "Zissou." This was also the first Wes Anderson film Wilson didn't co-write, after Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums. The gap between the two watches tells you everything about the gap between the two characters before either says a word.

Magnum wore a $165 dive watch for three seasons before anyone remembers what he had on his wrist. It was a Chronosport Sea Quartz 30, a 42mm diver rated to 300 meters, one of the first quartz movements ever built into a professional diver when it launched in 1977, chosen by the prop department as a plausible pick for a broke ex-SEAL, not a paid placement. Season four swapped it for a Rolex GMT-Master, almost certainly the reference 16750, produced 1980 to 1988, which lines up with the show's own run almost to the year: automatic caliber 3075, 40mm case, first GMT with a quickset date, 100 meters of water resistance. The show wrote it in as a gift from Magnum's father, a Navy pilot killed in Korea, a detail that doesn't survive contact with the fact that the GMT-Master didn't exist until the following year. Selleck kept the actual watch after filming wrapped and still owns it. Prices today run $8,000 to $15,000. He was also Spielberg's first choice for Indiana Jones; CBS wouldn't release him from this contract, and the role went to Harrison Ford instead.

Iceman flies by procedure and never improvises, which makes his Rolex read more like a credential than a costume. It's a GMT-Master reference 1675 with the Pepsi bezel, produced 1959 to 1980, already a vintage piece by the time filming started in 1986, the bezel showing real sun fade. Automatic caliber 1565 or 1575, 40mm case, bidirectional 24-hour bezel, aged examples now trading for $15,000 to $30,000 depending on fade. Kilmer also wears a two-tone Datejust in several scenes. Buried in the film's cockpit footage is a stranger detail: since Tom Cruise wasn't cleared to fly the actual F-14, real Navy aviators flew front seat for every in-air shot, and one close-up of the controls near the end of the film shows a Rolex Submariner 5513 on the wrist of the pilot actually flying the plane, not Maverick's chronograph or Iceman's GMT. A small, mostly accidental record of who was really doing the flying.

Brando had owned his GMT-Master since the early 1970s and refused to take it off, even when Coppola's production asked him to. It's a reference 1675 from 1972, running the automatic caliber 1570. The crew thought the bezel was too clean, too recognizable, for a colonel gone rogue in the Cambodian jungle. Brando's answer: "If they're looking at my watch, then I'm not doing my job as an actor." He pried the bezel off himself with a small knife and swapped the bracelet for a rubber strap, then scratched "M. Brando" into the case back by hand. The watch was believed lost for decades until his adopted daughter came forward in 2017 with the story: he'd given it to her as a 1995 graduation gift, telling her it was "like a tank, you can do anything you want to it and it will keep on going." Phillips sold it in 2019 for $1,952,000. Four years later it hammered again at Christie's Geneva for over $5.1 million. The bezel has never turned up.

Air America is set in Laos in 1969. Everything on screen, the hair, the wardrobe, the watch, reads as pure 1990. Gibson's Pepsi bezel GMT-Master could plausibly be a period-correct reference 1675, or the newer 16750 Rolex was actually selling when the film shot in late 1989, and nothing on screen settles it either way. Kurt Russell wore a Rolex Datejust in the same film, and Gibson had already worn a yellow gold Submariner two years earlier in Tequila Sunrise, which suggests the watch tracked the actor as much as the character. Automatic movement, 40mm steel case, 100 meters of water resistance, the same GMT complication Rolex built with Pan Am in the 1950s for airline pilots, which is at least a genuinely correct detail for a man who flies cargo for a living, anachronism aside.

Reddington's watch changes partway through The Blacklist, and fans noticed. He starts on a GMT-Master II reference 16710 with the Pepsi bezel on a Jubilee bracelet, then switches to the black and red Coke bezel on an Oyster bracelet by the end of season two and keeps it through season three. The 16710 ran 1989 to 2007 on the automatic caliber 3185, 40mm case, 100 meters water resistance, used today for $10,000 to $15,000. In one episode a character rifling through Reddington's belongings appraises the watch aloud at roughly ten grand, which is about right regardless of which bezel happens to be on it. Spader has a habit of wearing Rolex on screen beyond this role; as Robert California in The Office he wore a silver-dialed Datejust nobody's pinned down the reference for. For a man who spends the whole series moving between countries a step ahead of the FBI, a watch built to track two time zones at once was never just a prop.