David Oyelowo wears an Omega Speedmaster

In the fall of 2012, Christopher McQuarrie sat Tom Cruise and David Oyelowo across a table in a windowless Pittsburgh interrogation room and let the two men size each other up. Cruise plays Jack Reacher, a drifter with no address and no phone, working a sniper case from the outside. Oyelowo plays Detective Emerson, the man on the inside with the badge, the desk, and the procedural obligation to do it by the book. McQuarrie wrote and directed the film, adapting Lee Child's novel One Shot, and he shoots the scene the way he shoots most of the picture, close and quiet, with the camera watching hands as much as faces. Emerson keeps his clasped on the table. Richard Jenkins, as District Attorney Alex Rodin, stands behind him with his arms crossed.

Look at Emerson's left wrist in that shot and you can see the watch. It is a chronograph on a steel bracelet, black dial, three subdials, a central stopwatch hand, two pushers flanking the crown, a tachymeter scale around the edge. That is the architecture of an Omega Speedmaster, the line Omega built around timing things and later sent to the Moon. The exact reference never resolves on camera, and the dial is too soft to read the wordmark, so the most honest thing to say is that it is a Speedmaster and leave the model number alone.

What is quietly funny about the choice is how well it fits the man. A homicide detective spends his whole working life on timelines and alibis, on the question of who was where and for how long. McQuarrie, who would go on to direct Cruise through several Mission: Impossible films, has a good instinct for what a prop says about a character. He put a stopwatch on the wrist of a man whose job is to account for time, and he kept it under the cuff, showing only when Emerson's hands come to rest on the table.