David Thewlis wears an Omega Vintage Gold Chronograph

David Thewlis plays Peter Aufschnaiter in Seven Years in Tibet (1997), Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of Heinrich Harrer's memoir. Aufschnaiter is the level-headed leader of a 1939 Austrian expedition sent to climb Nanga Parbat in the Himalayas, and the brash young Harrer (Brad Pitt) is the celebrity climber who comes along. When the Second World War breaks out, British authorities intern the pair in India as enemy nationals. They escape and make a long, brutal trek north into Tibet, finally reaching the forbidden city of Lhasa, where Harrer becomes a tutor and friend to the teenage 14th Dalai Lama. Thewlis plays Aufschnaiter as the quieter, steadier half of the partnership, and the real man bears that out: a trained agronomist, he stayed in Tibet for years and put his skills to work on irrigation and building projects in and around Lhasa.

This particular shot is a tight close-up of Aufschnaiter, so the watch never comes into view in the frame itself. The identification rests instead on a separate close-up that GQ ran of the actual piece, a vintage rose-gold Omega chronograph. It is a bicompax model, meaning two sub-dials, with a running-seconds register and a 30-minute counter flanking the center of a silvered, cream-toned dial dressed in applied gold markers and an outer scale, all set in a rose-gold case on a black crocodile strap. It is an apt watch for an interwar European mountaineer and engineer a long way from home, the sort of solid, hand-wound chronograph a man like Aufschnaiter might genuinely have carried into the mountains in 1939.