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Daniel Craig's Rolex Explorer: What Bond Wears When No One's Watching

He wore Omega in five Bond films, became the face of the brand, and redefined a fictional spy for a generation. But here, sitting down with director Rian Johnson to answer questions about Knives Out, Daniel Craig is wearing a Rolex Explorer — the same watch the man who created James Bond wore every day of his life.

Daniel Craig. Source: YouTube / Knives Out Q&A

The Rolex Explorer on the wrist.

▶ Source: Daniel Craig & Rian Johnson Answering The Most Searched Knives Out Questions — YouTube

Daniel Craig was born on March 2, 1968, in Chester, Cheshire, and trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. His early career was built through theatre and a series of British television and film roles that established his range without quite announcing his arrival to a wider audience. That changed definitively in 2006 when he stepped into the role of James Bond in Casino Royale — a casting decision that, at the time, provoked genuine controversy. Too blond. Too rough. Not quite right. The internet was not kind. And then the film opened, and the argument was over.

Craig played Bond five times over fifteen years — through Casino Royale (2006), Quantum of Solace (2008), Skyfall (2012), Spectre (2015), and No Time to Die (2021) — each film layering additional weight and complexity onto a character that Craig insisted on treating as a human being rather than an icon. His Bond bled. His Bond grieved. His Bond, by the final film, had earned an ending. In parallel, Craig built a formidable second career outside the franchise: his Benoit Blanc detective in Rian Johnson's Knives Out series demonstrated a wit and ease that his Bond work, with its relentless intensity, rarely permitted. Here is an actor of considerable range, exercising it fully.

The watch situation is, in the world of watch culture, one of the more layered stories in contemporary collecting. Craig's Bond wore Omega in every film from 2006 to 2021 — a formal brand partnership that made the Seamaster synonymous with the character in a way that hadn't been true since Sean Connery wore a Rolex Submariner in the early films. Off-screen, Craig has been known to wear Omega as well, appearing publicly in various Seamaster models as part of the broader ambassador relationship. But Craig is also a serious watch collector with a documented affection for Rolex: a vintage Paul Newman Daytona, a GMT-Master II, a modified Project X Submariner, and the vintage Submariner 6538 that Connery wore on screen. And here, on a press day with Rian Johnson, the Bond who wore Omega every time a camera was rolling has reached for a Rolex Explorer.

"A gentleman's choice of timepiece says as much about him as does his Savile Row suit." — Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond

Fleming's Watch, Craig's Choice

Ian Fleming, who created James Bond in 1952, wore a Rolex Explorer — Reference 1016 — every day of his adult life. Photographs of Fleming at his Jamaican home, GoldenEye, on film sets, in interview: the Explorer is always there. It was not incidental. Fleming wrote that Bond's watch had to be a Rolex, specifically, because Bond was a man who used what he wore rather than merely displaying it. The Explorer embodied that philosophy precisely: no superfluous function, no concession to fashion, nothing that was not required by the task of telling the time accurately under any conditions.

The contractual Bond of the Craig era wore Omega. But the private man — on a press day for a Rian Johnson film, sitting across from a director in a room with no camera crew and no brand obligation — reaches for the Explorer. This is not a case of a celebrity being paid to wear a watch. It is a case of an actor with a substantial personal collection and a genuine understanding of horology choosing, when the choice is entirely his own, the most stripped-back, most purposeful watch that Rolex makes. That is information.

Why This Watch on This Wrist

Craig's Bond was, by deliberate design, a study in removing the artifice from a character who had always hidden behind it. Where previous Bonds were smooth surfaces — unruffled, unreadable, impeccably finished — Craig's version showed the damage underneath. He built a Bond for whom the elegance was effortful, which is a much more interesting proposition. The Rolex Explorer is, in horological terms, the same argument: a watch that achieves its effect through the removal of everything unnecessary, not through the addition of anything decorative. No colour. No complication. No statement other than the statement of absolute function. The man who played Bond as a human being, and not a silhouette, chose the watch that is exactly what it needs to be and nothing more. Ian Fleming would have approved. He would have recognised the choice immediately. He made it himself every morning for most of his life.

And at Spot.Watch — that's always worth noticing.