Miles Teller wears an IWC Pilot's Watches

Bradley Bradshaw walks the flightline in the evidence stills with a red-and-yellow painted helmet under his left arm, and in the close-up frame the wrist above it carries a thick black watch on an olive fabric strap. Miles Teller, cast in July 2018 over Nicholas Hoult and Glen Powell, plays Rooster, the son of Goose, Maverick's radar officer who died in the original film. Rooster knows that Maverick blocked his Naval Academy application and has spent his career blaming him for it, along with his father's death. What he does not know at first is why: Maverick promised Goose's dying wife that he would keep their son out of a fighter cockpit.

The watch belongs to the same closed program as the ones on Phoenix's and Bob's wrists. IWC has partnered with the Navy Fighter Weapons School, the real TOPGUN, since 2007, and it reserves two editions for graduates of the Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor course, watches the public cannot buy: a Mark XVIII three-hander and a ceramic chronograph, reference IW389004, each carrying the school's patch at nine o'clock on the dial. Monochrome Watches documented the film's SFTI pieces and captioned its still of Teller with the chronograph, and the close-up here agrees with that assignment: the case is thick and dark, ceramic rather than steel, on the green textile strap of the chronograph edition.

The scene everyone remembers came late in the process. Rooster at the piano in Penny's bar, playing Great Balls of Fire the way his father played it in 1986, was not in the script; Joseph Kosinski added it during editing 'to help explain the characters' relationship and to deepen the emotional conflicts involved.' By the end of the film the explanation runs both ways. Rooster disobeys orders to go back for a downed Maverick, the two steal an F-14 together, and when Rooster is shot out of the sky in turn, Maverick is the one who brings him home.