Benedict Cumberbatch wears an Omer

Ten years before The Imitation Game, Benedict Cumberbatch played another brilliant British scientist. Hawking (2004) is a BBC TV movie written by Peter Moffat and directed by Philip Martin, covering Stephen Hawking's years at Cambridge — his 21st birthday, his romance with Jane Wilde (Lisa Dillon), and the onset of the motor neuron disease that would define the rest of his life. Peter Firth plays Fred Hoyle, the steady-state cosmologist whose ideas young Hawking helped disprove, and John Sessions plays Hawking's doctoral supervisor Dennis Sciama.

Cumberbatch wears an Omer watch, a relatively obscure brand that fits the character's context. Hawking in the early 1960s was a graduate student, not a celebrity physicist, and his wristwatch would have been modest. The Omer reads as period-appropriate — the kind of watch a young Cambridge academic might have owned without thinking much about it. No Rolex, no Omega, just a watch that doesn't draw attention to itself on the wrist of a man whose mind was always the interesting part.