Amanda Seyfried wears a Rolex Datejust

The still on this record is The Dropout (2022) in a single frame: Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes at her desk in the black turtleneck, a green juice at her elbow, her own framed Fortune cover on the shelf behind her, and a steel watch on the wrist holding the phone. Hulu's miniseries tracks the rise and collapse of Theranos, the company Holmes founded at nineteen on the promise of blood tests from a finger-prick, and the costume department dressed her out of documented pieces. The watch is one of them. The real Holmes wore a stainless steel Rolex Datejust, visibly enough that a Rolex blog profiled her in March 2015 as a "Rolex Revolutionary," a trailblazer whose company was "poised to revolutionize modern medicine" and worth nine billion dollars. By late 2018, Theranos no longer existed.

The watch Seyfried wears to play her is not a real one, and that is documented too. Wrist Enthusiast, in a survey of the fake watches of film and television, found that the production "made sure to accurately outfit Seyfried with a Rolex Datejust similar to [the] Datejust with black dial that Holmes wore," then listed the giveaways: a crown the producers never screwed in, and a bracelet that "just doesn't fit fluidly to the case." The first tell survives in this record's own frame, where the crown stands proud of the steel case on its Oyster-style bracelet, just past the hem of the turtleneck sleeve. "The Datejust is not a particularly expensive watch," the site observed, "so one wonders why the prop department didn't just splurge for the real thing."