Aldis Hodge wears an A. Hodge Atelier Custom Prototype

Early in Black Adam (2022), Carter Hall wears a stately, gold-faced watch, and the watch has a backstory no prop house could supply: the man wearing it built it. Aldis Hodge, who plays Hawkman, runs a boutique timepiece company, A. Hodge Atelier, and when the film arrived he was deep in research and development on its flagship. "I was talking to my manufacturing partner," he told Vogue, "and I said, 'Look, there's an opportunity.'" The prototype he produced carries "a unique dial specific to the film, specific to Carter Hall and Hawkman, to speak to his lineage," and the lineage in question is the comic-book Hawkman's: an ancient Egyptian prince, or a lawman from the planet Thanagar, reincarnated across the ages into a founding member of the Justice Society.

Hodge had been designing watches for fifteen years by then, an obsession that began at an architecture firm where, between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, he drafted blueprints for buildings. He did the arithmetic for Vogue himself: fifteen years trying to design his own timepieces, fifteen years trying to play a superhero. "Serendipity." The watch was not his only fingerprint on the character, either. He pitched director Jaume Collet-Serra on civilian clothes that would reflect Hall's "cultural acumen and intelligence" ("He's been through ages and [a lot] of lives. He's not gonna be basic") and brought the tailor Waraire Boswell together with costume designers Kurt Swanson and Bart Mueller for a jacket of Italian and Japanese jacquards. That jacket is the one in this record's still, the gold prototype on the wrist coming out of its sleeve. The watch enthusiasm ran across the set: Pierce Brosnan, the film's Doctor Fate, told British GQ that a shared love of watches made him and Hodge fast friends.