Jason Statham wears a Rolex Submariner

Deckard Shaw is the precise one. Watch the two leads move through Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, the 2019 spinoff David Leitch built around a pair of men who cannot stand each other, and the difference shows up on their wrists. Dwayne Johnson's Hobbs wears a 44mm Panerai Luminor Submersible, a slab of steel scaled, like everything about Hobbs, to the man wearing it. Jason Statham's Shaw, the former British special forces operative turned mercenary, wears something smaller and older and far harder to spot: a vintage Rolex Submariner, reference 5513.

You have to know what you are looking at to catch it. The 5513 is the no-date Submariner Rolex made from 1962 to 1989, a 40mm steel case with a rotating dive bezel and the automatic Caliber 1520 inside, twenty-six jewels and a forty-two-hour reserve. No date window, no cyclops bubble on the crystal, none of the visual clutter the modern Submariner would later carry. It is the reference that underpinned the military-issue Submariners, the ones built to be read at a glance underwater and otherwise left alone.

And here is the part that makes a watch person smile. The Rolex everyone calls the Steve McQueen is the Explorer II, reference 1655, a watch McQueen never actually wore. The one he did wear, the watch he eventually handed to his longtime stuntman Loren Janes and that later crossed the auction block at Phillips, was a Submariner 5513. So when Statham puts a 5513 on the wrist of a laconic, dangerous Englishman, he is reaching for the real thing rather than the legend.

Did Statham choose it himself? The film never says a word about the watch. Nobody mentions it, nobody glances at it, it is simply on his wrist. But he wore the same 5513 to the press tour, sitting for interviews in the watch his character wears on screen, which is why almost everyone who has written about it assumes the Submariner is his own and not the costume department's. Statham has a long, documented fondness for vintage Rolex, and the simplest read is that the watch was already his.