Actress, Producer & The Morning Show — Apple TV+
Jennifer Aniston's Cartier Santos: The First Wristwatch on Television's Most Watched Anchor
Spotted on the set of The Morning Show on the wrist of Jennifer Aniston, playing anchor Alex Levy: a Cartier Santos. The square case, eight exposed screws, Roman numeral dial, and bracelet that has been one of watchmaking's most recognisable silhouettes for over a century. It is not a casual choice for a character who lives on camera, where every second is measured — and the watch itself was built on exactly that principle.
| Jennifer Aniston as Alex Levy — Cartier Santos on wrist. Source: The Morning Show, Apple TV+ |
The Cartier Santos — square case, exposed screws, Roman numerals — on set |
Jennifer Aniston was born February 11, 1969, in Sherman Oaks, California, to Greek-born actor John Aniston and actress Nancy Dow. Her parents divorced when she was nine. She grew up in New York, attended the High School of Performing Arts — the school that would later inspire the film and television series Fame — and after graduating in 1987 spent several years in Off-Broadway productions, living on almost nothing, working toward a career that showed no particular signs of arriving on schedule. By 1993 she was, by her own account, floundering. Then a pilot called Friends Like These came along and she was asked to audition for the role of Monica Geller. She declined and auditioned instead for Rachel Green.
Friends ran from 1994 to 2004, became one of the most watched television series in history, and made Aniston — along with her five co-stars — among the highest-paid performers on American television, earning $1 million per episode by the show's final seasons. Her portrayal of Rachel Green won her a Primetime Emmy Award in 2002 and a Golden Globe in 2003. The haircut she wore in the early seasons became a cultural moment of its own. A film career ran in parallel: The Good Girl (2002), Bruce Almighty (2003), The Break-Up (2006), Marley & Me (2008), Horrible Bosses (2011), We're the Millers (2013), Cake (2014) — the last earning her nominations at both the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild Awards for a performance that finally and definitively separated her from Rachel Green in the minds of critics who had struggled to do so.
In 2019, fifteen years after Friends ended, she returned to television as executive producer and lead of The Morning Show on Apple TV+, co-starring Reese Witherspoon. She plays Alex Levy, a veteran morning news anchor navigating the fallout from her co-host's misconduct scandal — a character of considerable complexity, vanity, moral ambiguity, and survival instinct. For the role she won a Screen Actors Guild Award and earned Primetime Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. She also co-founded the production company Echo Films in 2008, launched the LolaVie haircare brand in 2021, and holds a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Her box office gross stands at over $1.6 billion worldwide.
"The iconic square-case watch, with its exposed screws and sleek Roman numerals, added a touch of timeless sophistication to Alex Levy's polished on-screen style." — Spot.Watch, on the set of The Morning Show
Timepiece
Cartier Santos
The story begins with a friendship and a practical complaint. In 1904, Alberto Santos-Dumont — a flamboyant Brazilian aviator who had become a celebrity in Paris for his airship flights around the Eiffel Tower — told his friend Louis Cartier that pocket watches were impractical in the cockpit. He needed both hands on the controls. He needed to read the time at a glance. Cartier's solution was to miniaturise a timepiece and strap it to Santos-Dumont's wrist — creating, in the process, what is widely regarded as the first purpose-built men's wristwatch in history. Santos-Dumont wore it on November 12, 1906, when he became the first person to be filmed in an airplane in flight, covering 220 metres in 21.5 seconds with a Cartier on his wrist. The watch went into public production in 1911 and has not left the Cartier catalogue since.
The Santos is immediately recognisable by its signature architecture: a square case with softly rounded corners, eight exposed screws on the bezel that were both structural and decorative from the original design, a white dial with Roman numerals, and an integrated bracelet that flows from the case in a single uninterrupted line. The design anticipates the Art Deco movement that would define the 1920s and 1930s — clean, geometric, devoid of unnecessary ornament. It has been updated and relaunched across multiple generations and is currently produced in both the Santos de Cartier (with automatic movement and QuickSwitch interchangeable straps) and the Santos-Dumont (hand-wound, slimmer, more formal) configurations. The modern Santos de Cartier is available in stainless steel, two-tone steel and yellow gold, and full yellow gold, with cases ranging from medium to large, and water resistance of 100 metres.
| Origin | Designed by Louis Cartier, 1904 — first men's wristwatch |
| Case shape | Square with softly rounded corners — 8 exposed screws on bezel |
| Materials | Stainless steel / two-tone steel & gold / yellow gold — sapphire crystal |
| Movement | Automatic (Santos de Cartier) / hand-wound (Santos-Dumont) |
| Dial | White — Roman numerals, blued sword-shaped hands |
| Bracelet | Integrated link bracelet with QuickSwitch — interchangeable with leather strap |
| Water resistance | 100 metres (Santos de Cartier current models) |
| Market value | From approx. $7,000 USD (steel) to $20,000+ (gold configurations) |
The Watch Built for Someone Who Cannot Look Away
The Santos was created because a man needed to know the time without taking his hands off the controls. Alex Levy, the character Aniston plays in The Morning Show, lives in a variation of the same constraint. She is on camera, live, in front of millions of people, in a job where every second is counted and nothing can be fumbled. The watch on a morning news anchor's wrist is a prop with genuine meaning: it tells the audience that this person knows exactly how much time is left, at all times, without needing to be told. The Cartier Santos — the watch that solved the aviator's problem in 1904 — is the correct object for a character whose entire professional existence is organised around the management of seconds.
The costume design choice is also visually precise. The square case reads clearly on camera in a way that a round watch does not — it has corners that catch light, a geometric authority that registers even in a medium shot. The exposed screws give it texture and presence. On the wrist of a character dressed in the polished, controlled aesthetic of a network news anchor, it communicates exactly what it should: that this is a person who has been in the business long enough to develop specific tastes, and whose tastes run toward the enduring rather than the fashionable.
Why the Santos Endures
The Cartier Santos has been in continuous production, in various forms, for over a century. That is not a common achievement. Most watches are relaunched and repositioned; the Santos has simply remained itself — same square case, same exposed screws, same Roman numerals — updated in materials and movements but never reconceived. It has been worn by men and women, in boardrooms and cockpits and on red carpets, across twelve decades. Its wearer on the set of The Morning Show is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most recognisable faces in television history. The watch that was built for a man who needed to read the time at a glance in 1904 sits on the wrist of a woman playing a character who lives by that same imperative in 2024. Some designs just keep finding the right wrist.
And at Spot.Watch — that's always worth noticing.
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