Bruce Willis wears a TAG Heuer 3000 Series

John McClane wears his watch turned inward, against the inside of his right wrist, and keeps it there through the long night in Nakatomi Plaza. Bruce Willis's watch in Die Hard (1988) is a TAG Heuer Professional 3000. John McTiernan's film turned Willis from the wisecracking lead of Moonlighting into the defining action star of the era, with his arms bare for most of the runtime: a tank top, the air ducts, the broken glass, the watch against his wrist through all of it.

The Professional 3000 is a quartz chronograph built on a dive-style case: a gray dial with applied markers and three sub-dials, a steel bezel with the numerals inlaid, and depth markings to fifty meters around the rim. It was TAG Heuer's accessible, mid-priced sport watch of the late 1980s. The screen-used watch still exists, with TAG Heuer's marks on the caseback and a worn grey leather strap, scuffed and lightly rusted from the shoot, and it came up at Prop Store's entertainment memorabilia auction in 2018.