Jennifer Connelly wears a Rolex Explorer

In the 1986 Top Gun, Penny Benjamin never appears on screen. She exists as a name in other people's dialogue, the admiral's daughter Maverick got in trouble over, identified by Goose and teased about by his wife. Top Gun: Maverick makes her a person thirty-six years later: Jennifer Connelly, cast in July 2018, plays Penny as a single mother, a bar owner near the naval base, and the one adult in Pete Mitchell's life who knew him before the legend hardened. The frame in evidence is their sunset scene beside her dark vintage Porsche, his hand at her waist, and both of them wearing their histories on their wrists.

Hers is a vintage Rolex. When the film opened, Hodinkee first read the small steel watch as an Oyster Perpetual, then corrected itself on a closer look: an Explorer, likely the reference 1016. Monochrome Watches and Time and Tide settled on the same identification, and Time and Tide noted the dial has gone brown with age, the fading collectors call tropical. The 1016 is the Explorer at its plainest, in Time and Tide's words 'everything you need and nothing you don't in a time-only watch,' and the magazine allowed itself one speculation, clearly labeled: perhaps a family heirloom, possibly passed along as a gift from her admiral father. The film never says. In the same frame, Maverick's black Porsche Design chronograph hangs beside her Rolex, the watch his character carried over from 1986.

The production story came out when Hodinkee called the film's prop master, Robbie Duncan, who explained where Penny's watch actually came from: 'That watch actually came from one of the producers' wives. She had one and then we were able to get another one. It is a beautiful vintage Rolex.'