Pierre Png wears a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona

Crazy Rich Asians spends two hours flaunting wealth, and its single most valuable object is on screen for about a second. Astrid Leong, the quietly graceful cousin played by Gemma Chan, gives her husband Michael Teo a watch. Pierre Png plays Michael as a man half-drowned in his wife's family money, proud and resentful of it at the same time, and the gift reads as love and as a reminder of the gap between them.

The watch is a Rolex "Paul Newman" Cosmograph Daytona, reference 6263, with the panda dial that collectors prize above almost anything else the brand has made. The one on screen was real. Author Kevin Kwan emailed the watch specialist Eric Wind with the subject line "URGENT: Amazing Watch Needed," and with roughly forty-eight hours before the shoot Wind found a Singapore collector willing to lend a Daytona then worth around half a million dollars. Director Jon M. Chu had it flown in with its own bodyguard for a scene that lasts a heartbeat. Png later said his hands were shaking, not from the romance he was playing but from holding something worth more than most of the houses in the film.