Nicholas Galitzine wears a TAG Heuer Carrera

Early in The Idea of You, Hayes Campbell's manager bursts into his trailer with news: he has landed the TAG Heuer campaign. The watch and Solène enter his life in the same scene. Nicholas Galitzine plays Hayes, the 24-year-old front man of the boy band August Moon. Anne Hathaway plays Solène Marchand, a divorced Los Angeles gallery owner about to turn 40, who walks into that trailer at Coachella thinking it is a bathroom and leaves having flirted with a pop star sixteen years younger than she is.

The watch is a TAG Heuer Carrera Date, reference WBN2111.BA0639: 39mm of stainless steel with a brushed silver dial, a smooth bezel, and one date window at 6 o'clock, run by the automatic Calibre 5 and rated to 100 meters. It lists today for about 3,700 dollars. Karen Neasi, the film's product placement coordinator, chose it after rejecting the brand first lined up for the part, whose pieces she called old man watches she would not put on a British rock star. She wanted something that read as cool on Hayes and still made sense on Solène, whom Neasi describes as an arty Silver Lake gallery mom. Her prop man had the Carrera on set within the hour, from a store in Atlanta near the film's Georgia shoot.

From there the Carrera works as a barometer of the romance. Hayes leaves it behind after their first night together so he has a reason to come back, and from then on it changes wrists with the relationship: when the two are together Solène wears it, when they split he takes it. Neasi calls it the third character in the film. She and TAG both say the watch was not a paid placement, even though the story around it opens with Hayes signing the TAG Heuer endorsement that puts the Carrera on his wrist in the first place.