John Cena wears a Pinion Axis II Bronze BL

F9 reaches into nine films of backstory and produces a brother for Dom Toretto. John Cena plays Jakob, the sibling no one mentioned, a contract killer working alongside the hacker Cipher and estranged from Dom since their father died in a racing crash. Cena keeps him cold and precise until the franchise does what it always does and hands him a redemption arc.

The watch is the surprising part. It is a Pinion Axis II Bronze BL, made by a small independent watchmaker in England, and the only reason anyone knows that is Pinion itself, which posted that its costume team fitted Cena with the watch for a key scene in the film. On screen it is easy to miss, a dim metallic glint on his left wrist in the standoff with Dom, too dark to read. The label, not the camera, is what identifies it.

There is a small joke in the casting. Cena is one of the more serious Rolex collectors in Hollywood, the owner of an Explorer II and a GMT-Master Batman, the kind of man who wore a Rolex to match the F9 logo at the press tour. On screen, playing the most dangerous man in the movie, he wears a watch from a company most Rolex owners have never heard of.