The Casio F-91W: The Most Worn Watch in the World, On Screen and Off

In June 1989, Casio released a watch nobody thought much of at the time: a rectangular resin case, a black-and-white LCD, a designer named Ryusuke Moriai who would go on to shape some of the most iconic G-Shocks ever made. The F-91W was a modest update to an earlier model, the F-87W, and it cost about the same as a fast-food meal. Nobody at Casio could have predicted what happened next. The design never really changed, because it never needed to. Thirty-seven years later, Casio still builds roughly 3 million of them a year, and total production has passed 100 million units, making the F-91W the best-selling watch in history, worn on more wrists, in more countries, at more income levels, than anything Rolex, Omega, or Apple has ever produced. It has been worn by a sitting American president before he held office and by the world's most wanted man. It has shown up on Nobel laureates, vampires, video game NPCs, and a South Korean children's-game death match. Here is where it turns up.

Bryan Stevenson graduated from Harvard Law School and moved to Alabama to represent death row inmates who couldn't afford legal counsel. Michael B. Jordan plays him building the Equal Justice Initiative from nothing, a Casio F-91W on his wrist throughout. The choice carries more weight than it looks like it should: the F-91W was named in Guantanamo Bay assessments as a watch commonly linked to al-Qaeda bomb-making, and some airports flagged it for extra screening. Stevenson wears the accused's watch while representing clients the system had already decided were guilty before trial. He has since exonerated more than 140 death row inmates, founded the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and teaches at NYU Law. He wore a $15 Casio through all of it, which reads as either a quiet statement or simply what the man had on his wrist. In Just Mercy, both readings hold at once.

Forest runs a billion-dollar quantum computing company from a compound in the California redwoods, trying to reconstruct the entire history of the universe. Nick Offerman plays him as a man who resolved most questions other people are still asking. On his wrist: the F-91WM-9A, the gold-toned variant, same movement and dimensions as the standard black model, thirty dollars. Alex Garland doesn't make visual choices in this show by accident. There's a specific subset of extremely wealthy people who wear extremely cheap watches precisely because the watch has stopped needing to do any social work for them. Forest is fictional. The logic behind putting a $30 Casio on a billionaire's wrist is not.

Michael Morbius is a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist turning himself into a living vampire while trying to cure a blood disease he's carried since childhood. He wears an F-91W. The two facts sit further apart than they look: a man rewriting his own biology, and the most ordinary watch ever manufactured, sitting on his wrist the whole time nobody in the film comments on it. That's the point. The F-91W is what a person wears when they are thinking about literally everything except what's on their wrist.

Guy is a bank teller in a video game city, built to blend into the background: same coffee, same shirt, same route, every single day. His watch is an F-91W, which is the most default wristwatch that has ever existed. Costume designer Marlene Stewart reportedly gave it close to eight minutes of visible screen time across the film, considerable presence for a watch that costs less than the movie ticket. Guy doesn't know yet that he's a non-player character. The watch already knew what it was.

Dustin wears an F-91W in Season 2, set in October 1984. The watch launched in 1989. It's the same kind of anachronism the show's own props team made with Mike Wheeler's calculator watch elsewhere in the series, a Casio that fits the era's aesthetic without actually existing yet inside it. Dustin swaps to an Armitron by Season 3, and the F-91W is left behind, a small, mostly unnoticed continuity slip in a show that otherwise takes 1980s detail seriously.

Ali Abdul arrives with nothing: a Pakistani migrant worker in South Korea, unpaid for months, a wife and infant waiting at home. The F-91W on his wrist isn't a choice so much as a circumstance, the watch a person ends up with when everything else is out of reach. Squid Game runs entirely on the mechanics of economic desperation, and Ali's watch tells you where he stands in that hierarchy before he speaks a single line. He is not a man who chose this watch. He is a man for whom this was the only watch there was.

Photographs from years before the presidency show a young Barack Obama wearing a black F-91W, long before anyone was paying attention to what was on his wrist. It didn't make headlines at the time. It became a talking point only in retrospect, both for the contrast with the office he'd eventually hold and for the genuinely strange company the F-91W keeps across the ideological spectrum, a watch that has ended up, entirely by coincidence, on some of the most recognizable wrists of the last four decades, for reasons that have nothing to do with each other.

Amelia Dimoldenberg's Chicken Shop Date runs on deadpan control that is nearly impossible to disrupt. Eric Andre has built an entire career on disrupting exactly that kind of control. He wore the light blue F91WC-2A, part of Casio's color-variant line, running the identical module in a shade no head of state or elite operator would ever choose. The episode, which Dimoldenberg promoted as "potentially my most outrageous date yet," pulled nearly 2.7 million views in its first three days. The watch performed exactly as consistently as it always does. Everything around it did not.

Louis Theroux interviews the most image-obsessed men on the internet while wearing a $20 F-91W. The manosphere runs entirely on projecting status. Theroux turns up in the best-selling watch in history, which happens to also be one of the cheapest, and the mismatch is doing quiet work in every frame he's in.

Classified Guantanamo briefing documents once described F-91W ownership as a contributing factor in continued detention, evidence, however circumstantial, of al-Qaeda bomb-making training. At the same time, British soldiers deploying to the same conflicts were buying the identical watch from military kit suppliers before they shipped out, for about £10, because it weighs nothing, survives anything, and does exactly what a soldier needs a watch to do. Nobody has ever fully reconciled those two facts. The watch doesn't know which side it's on. It just keeps time.

The KSK, Germany's tier-one special operations command, is secretive by design, and photographs of operators in the field are rare. When they surface, an F-91W on the wrist isn't a surprise, it's close to standard. No metal to catch light, no moving parts to fail, replaceable for the price of a coffee if lost or destroyed. Elite units around the world have quietly reached the same conclusion for the same reasons: the watch that costs fifteen dollars has never once compromised a mission. The same can't be said for watches that cost a hundred times more.

A few more names worth knowing before you go: Gary Oldman wears one in Slow Horses, playing a burnt-out spy in a show built entirely around people who used to matter more than they do now, which might be the single most tonally correct F-91W placement on this list. Channing Tatum wears one in Logan Lucky. Ewan McGregor has been spotted in one off-duty, out of costume, which is the closest the F-91W ever gets to a compliment: nobody puts it on for a role, they just happen to already be wearing it. The watch has never needed an ambassador. For thirty-seven years and a hundred million units, it has been its own advertisement, worn by presidents, vampires, special forces operators, and the man selling you a chicken shop date, and it still does the one thing all of them actually needed a watch to do.