Aaron Pierre wears a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona

The still on this record does the identification work itself: Aaron Pierre on the beach in a mesh tank, mid-conversation, and an inset zoom of his left wrist showing a steel watch on an Oyster bracelet, white dial, three dark-ringed registers, the Rolex Cosmograph Daytona in its white-dial steel form. M. Night Shyamalan wrote and directed Old (2021), from the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, about a beach where the trapped visitors age roughly a year every thirty minutes. Pierre plays a rapper whose stage name, Mid-Sized Sedan, Shyamalan chose before casting him; the film withholds his real name, Brendan, until deep into the story, and gives him hemophilia, which on this beach is a death sentence in slow motion. The French watch site Montres-de-luxe logged the watch as a steel Daytona with a white dial, which is exactly what the inset shows.

The Daytona is the Rolex with the deepest pop-culture shadow: Paul Newman's own exotic-dial 6239 sold at Phillips in 2017 for more than 17 million dollars, then the highest price ever paid for a wristwatch at auction, and the white-dial steel version remains the brand's most chased modern model. Pierre went on to bigger billing, Rebel Ridge and the voice of Mufasa in 2024, but in Old he is ensemble, wearing the famous chronograph on the one beach where measuring elapsed time does nobody any good.