So, what do we know about Don’t Look Up so far?
We know that it’s Netflix’s Christmas Eve powerhouse, a black comedy caper with more A-listers than the entire MCU – Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande, Scott Mescudi, Cate Blanchet and Meryl Streep all star. We know it’s being directed by Adam “The Big Short” McKay and it concerns two “low-level astronomers” who try and warn the world a comet is coming to destroy Earth.
We know from the trailer that just launched that the whole thing screams quality.
Watch aficionados may have learned something extra, too. On Jonah Hill’s wrist is a Richard Mille RM 052 Skull Titanium – or a replica thereof – a watch that will cost you £500,000 to buy... at least it would if there were any of the 15 ever made still left.
Richard Mille is known for a couple of things – watches that cost the same as houses, and his incredible celebrity endorsements. Nobody really knows if George Clooney makes a Nespresso before he goes and does some acting. But we do know that Rafael Nadal wears his RM 27-03 to play tennis, because Richard Mille made it light enough and strong enough to wear on his wrist as he smashes the ball about at the French Open.
Mille operates at a hitherto untapped intersection between cutting-edge engineering – “a racing machine on the wrist” as his ads have it – and a kind of audacious French cheek. His RM69 was an “erotic timepiece” that featured on its face a three-tier rotating display of saucy messages – ‘I WANT TO’ ‘DEVOUR’ ‘YOUR NIPPPLES’ – and so on. And yes, it really was called the RM69.
His RM 052 Skull Titanium is arguably even more eye-catching. Its baseplate and bridges are made up of a grade 5 titanium skull, the upper and lower jaws are positioned so they appear to hold a ruby in its mouth. Its tripartite case required 255 machining steps, while the four bridges that connect the movement to the case are arranged in a "skull-and-crossbones” pattern, referencing pirate flags. Launched in 2012, the RM 052 Skull Titanium does occasionally appear on resale sites, very much in the £POA category.
Aside from his many fine qualities as an actor, Hill has developed a late side-career as a style icon – favouring vintage tie-dye t-shirts, Saint Laurent jackets, Prada bowling shirts and rainbow hair dye jobs. The whole “this celebrity doesn’t need a stylist, thanks” statement.
On the watch front Hill is a bit more classic, having been spotted in a Patek Philippe Nautilus and many, many Rolexes – Daytonas (both steel and gold), a Milgauss and a “Hulk” Submariner.
In Don’t Look Up he plays the US President’s son and chief of staff Jason Orelan (great name), who tells a preposterously bearded Leonardo DiCaprio, playing astronomer Randall Mindy (even better name), “You’re breathing is stressing me out, dude!”
From the three-seconds of Orelan we’ve seen it promises to be classic Jonah: the loudest thing in the room, impossible to ignore and just a little bit hard to take seriously.
In which case a half-a-million quid ruby-studded skeletonized skull watch would seem just about spot on.
