Brendan Gleeson wears a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona

Safe House is built to keep your eyes on Denzel Washington. He plays Tobin Frost, the most hated and feared traitor the CIA has, a man who slipped counterintelligence for the better part of a decade before resurfacing in Cape Town, where a rookie named Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) inherits the job of keeping him alive. Back at headquarters, the senior officers run the crisis by phone and screen, and one of them is David Barlow, played by Brendan Gleeson, the steady older hand everyone trusts. By the end of the film, that steady older hand turns out to be the corruption they have all been chasing.

Barlow wears a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona, steel case, white dial. It is the least showy watch in the Daytona family, no gold, no diamonds, just a chronograph in stainless steel. Rolex built the Daytona in 1963 for motor racing, and the tachymeter ring around its dial was meant for timing a car over a measured mile, though the watch has spent most of its life on wrists that never go near a track. A senior official in a plain steel watch is the most unremarkable thing in the room, which is exactly the cover Barlow turns out to need.