Max Minghella wears a Hublot Big Bang

Early in Industry's fourth season, Whitney Halberstram takes a call in a dim office, a corded receiver against his ear, his face giving nothing away. Max Minghella plays him as the show's first true villain, the man who built the payments startup Tender with Jonah, played by Kal Penn, then forced him out. On his wrist in these early scenes is a Hublot Big Bang, the loud, young-money watch of a tech founder with something to prove.

The choice is deliberate. Industry's costume designer, Laura Smith, builds Halberstram's wrist to match whoever he wants to pull close. "Whitney's watch choices were about elements of mirroring people he wanted to draw close," she tells GQ. The Big Bang sells the part better than most: Hublot is a young house, founded in 1980, and the model that made its name arrived only in 2005, all exposed screws and rubber. It is success worn as a costume, made, in Smith's words, so the man "could hide in plain sight."

Halberstram is written as an homage to Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith's con man, who reshapes himself to fit whatever room he stands in. Minghella came to the part with the source material in the family: his father, Anthony, wrote and directed The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1999. The watches move with the con. He meets Harper Stern in a TAG Heuer Monaco, the most masculine watch on the shelf, and dresses for the aristocrat Henry Muck in a Longines. By the finale Tender has collapsed and the act is over, and the watch on Halberstram's wrist is a plain field piece, the only one all season he is not wearing for someone else's benefit.