J.K. Simmons wears a Jardur Degreemeter

The still on this record catches J.K. Simmons on a tarmac in front of a military cargo plane, leather jacket, aviator sunglasses, and a steel chronograph with a wide knurled bezel and a black dial on his left wrist. Simmons plays James Forester Sr. in Chris McKay's The Tomorrow War (2021), the estranged father of Chris Pratt's Dan Forester, and the watch is a Jardur Degreemeter, the brand's modern revival of its 1941 Bezelmeter 960 pilot's chronograph. The dial carries Jardur's signature, a red spiral scale marked in degrees up to 180 and calibrated to the standard rate turn of three degrees per second, so a pilot timing a turn with the chronograph could read his heading change straight off the sweep hand; two full revolutions and the 360 degree turn is complete.

The history behind that scale is American, not Swiss. Jardur made aviation accessories, flight calculators, navigation plotters, and protractors, and its wartime chronographs ran Swiss Valjoux movements signed by the Pilgrim Electric Corp. The military never officially commissioned them; aviators bought their own through the Navy Post Exchanges, and one documented Bezelmeter belonged to Jimmy Doolittle. The brand's previous film appearance was on Robert De Niro's wrist in Ronin in 1998.

Simmons was not handed this watch by a prop master. iW magazine, naming the Degreemeter on his wrist in the film, reported that Simmons is a Jardur fan who chose the watch for his role, and the brand had already counted him as one of its own: a 2016 post on Jardur's blog lists "Academy Award winning actor, JK Simmons" among the wearers of the new Degreemeter, in a planned brand history alongside the "Old Escadrille" of wartime pilots like Doolittle.