Jonathan Rhys Meyers wears an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak

Ari Ben-Sion is an Israeli spy posing as a German businessman named Hans Hoffmann in 1989 Berlin, and Damascus Cover (2017) sends him into Syria under that cover, ordered to help a Jewish family escape the country. Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays him in carpet-dealer suits with a gold Audemars Piguet Royal Oak on his left wrist, its octagonal bezel catching the light even in the still where he hunches over a tiny piece of spy hardware. For a low-budget thriller the cast runs deep: John Hurt plays his handler Miki in what became the actor's final film appearance, and the film is dedicated to his memory; Jürgen Prochnow, the captain of Das Boot, plays the German Franz Ludin; Olivia Thirlby is Kim Johnson, an American photojournalist. Daniel Zelik Berk directed, from the 1977 Howard Kaplan novel.

The watch identification comes from the French site Montres-de-Luxe, which named it a rose gold Royal Oak reference 15400 and observed that it shows up in practically every scene. The same article caught the production slipping: the story takes place in 1989, and the 15400, the 41mm generation of Gérald Genta's 1972 design, did not exist yet. Audemars Piguet would not introduce it for another two decades. No other publication has covered the watch, so the identification rests on that one report and what the frames show, a gold watch with the Royal Oak's unmistakable eight-sided bezel.