Chris Hemsworth wears a TAG Heuer Carrera

Joseph Kosinski put out two films in 2022. The same summer Top Gun: Maverick was filling theaters, Spiderhead landed on Netflix, adapted by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick from Escape from Spiderhead, a George Saunders story first published in The New Yorker in 2010. Chris Hemsworth, who also produced the film, plays Steve Abnesti, the man who runs an island penitentiary where inmates wear drug-dispensing devices called MobiPaks and volunteer for emotion-altering trials in exchange for individual rooms, no guards, and the run of a facility that looks more like a research retreat than a prison. The production shot it in Queensland, on the Gold Coast and out at the Whitsunday Islands, and Hemsworth plays Abnesti in wire-rimmed glasses and soft dark tailoring, a tech founder's idea of a warden.

On Abnesti's left wrist sits a steel chronograph on a brown leather strap. In the frame where he stands at the rail above the facility's spiral staircase, hand at his chin, the watch shows its case and pushers clearly and its dial only as a dark surface under the glare on the crystal. Spotting databases identify it as a TAG Heuer Carrera chronograph, and the most specific claim in circulation, an anthracite 42-millimeter reference on brown leather, comes from those databases alone; neither TAG Heuer nor any watch publication has confirmed it. The Carrera itself goes back to 1963, when Jack Heuer designed a chronograph for gentleman drivers after the Rodriguez brothers introduced him to the Carrera Panamericana, the Mexican open-road race, at Sebring the year before. His brief was legibility above everything, and the first reference, the 2447, set a template the line still follows.

Hemsworth has been a TAG Heuer ambassador since 2015, an association that began when he played the Formula One driver James Hunt in Rush, and his own collection includes the limited-edition Autavia Jack Heuer. A TAG Heuer on TAG Heuer's own ambassador, in a film he produced, looks like an arranged placement. Nobody on the record says so. Neither the brand nor the production has discussed the watch, and the identification still rests on fan databases rather than anyone who handled the prop.