Daniel Craig wears a Rolex

Two years before Casino Royale, Daniel Craig made his case for Bond in a bathtub. In Matthew Vaughn's Layer Cake he plays a London cocaine dealer the script never names, billed only as XXXX, a careful operator who wants to make one clean score and walk away from the business for good. Sienna Miller, Tom Hardy in an early role, and Colm Meaney fill out the world around him. The film did well enough, and Craig was magnetic enough in it, that it is widely credited with helping put him in the running for 007.

In one of the film's quieter beats he is in the bath, phone pressed to his ear, one arm hooked over the rim of the tub. A steel watch sits on that wrist, dark dial, polished steel bracelet of the three-link Oyster kind. The brand is almost certainly Rolex, though the shot never lets you read the dial, and watch people have argued for years over exactly which Rolex it is without ever settling it. What the film does show, elsewhere, is how the character treats it. When he gets hands-on with his product he slides the watch off and drops it into his jeans pocket, the businessman keeping the nice thing clean while he does the dirty part of the job.

There is a small joke in it that only landed later. The man about to become the most famous Omega wearer in movies spends his breakout role in a Rolex, the brand Bond wore back in the Connery days. In 2004 nobody watching knew that yet. He was just a sharp London dealer with a good steel watch he was smart enough to take off before things got messy.