Donald Glover wears a Rolex Snoopy Dial (custom)

John Smith goes through Rolexes the way other men go through shirts. Donald Glover plays him in Mr. & Mrs. Smith as one half of a pair of strangers a shadow agency pairs off, hands the cover names John and Jane, and puts to work as married assassins. The watches are half cover and half reward. "Every time he does a mission, we were thinking that John might go shopping," costume designer Madeline Weeks told GQ, and the shopping shows: a Daytona, a Submariner, a GMT-Master II in both its Pepsi and Root Beer trim, watches that, as Weeks noted, you cannot even get.

One watch in the rotation does not match the rest. It is a Rolex with Snoopy painted on the dial, the Peanuts beagle sitting where the brand's own name belongs. Rolex never made it. The dial is custom work, the kind that turned up on Air Kings and Oyster Perpetuals in the 1970s and 1980s, and the company has never put a cartoon on a watch of its own. Weeks said it appears in a few episodes but is hard to spot, and steered anyone looking for it toward a close look at episode seven.

A cartoon dog cuts against everything else John keeps on his wrist. Weeks built him as a buyer of quiet, expensive watches, no diamonds, nothing that shouts, the kind chosen to hold their value. The Snoopy is the exception, the one piece a serious Rolex owner would file under novelty. The rest of his Rolexes are coveted because almost no one can get them. A Snoopy dial is the opposite kind of watch, the sort anyone with an old Oyster Perpetual and a steady hand could put together at home.