THE CURATED EDITION.
Reportage /
On the promotional round for The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan wore a Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso made in ten pieces for The Dark Knight Rises, the bat symbol hidden on its reverse.
WATCHES · THE REVERSO
Some watches tell stories; others keep secrets. The one Christopher Nolan wore through the interviews for The Odyssey belongs firmly to the second kind. Seen from the front, it is a Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso of almost austere restraint. Turn the case over and a different film begins.
The watch, reference 277.8.62, borrows the spare lines of the Tribute to 1931, the house’s homage to the original Reverso. Its reversible case back, however, carries a pixelated bat symbol in black lacquer. Only ten were made, in 2012, to mark the release of The Dark Knight Rises, the final chapter of Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and they were given to Warner Bros. executives and to the director himself. An engraving inside the case records the rights of Warner Bros. Entertainment and DC Comics, a quiet certificate of origin.
One example came up at Antiquorum in New York in April 2013. Estimated at 8,000 to 12,000 dollars, it sold for 16,250. Thirteen years and one collecting boom later, the number would read very differently.
Set the bat aside and what remains is a dress watch of real rigour. The stainless steel case measures 46 by 27mm, its surfaces alternating polished and satin, framed by the Reverso’s familiar gadroons. Beneath the sapphire crystal sits a black dial with a railway minute track, luminous baton indices and sword hands. Inside is the manual-winding calibre 822, which keeps the case to a slender 7mm, a quiet echo of the watches designed to survive polo matches in British India.
The Reverso and Gotham go back decades. In Batman Forever, Val Kilmer’s Bruce Wayne flipped a Reverso Grande Taille to speak to Alfred, long before video calls were ordinary. In Nolan’s own trilogy, Christian Bale’s Wayne moved between the Grande Taille and the Reverso Grande Date, the right accessory for a billionaire whose public face is a mask.
A two-faced watch is, by nature, a study in duality. It is hard to imagine a better object for a man most people see as a playboy before they recognise what he becomes after dark. And beyond the private joke, the watch is simply beautiful: the Art Deco proportions of the Tribute to 1931 remain among the most admired in modern watchmaking.
On camera, Nolan shows the world a plain black dial. The bat stays against his wrist, where only he knows it is there. Some secrets are kept best by the people who invented them.
GABRIEL SILVEIRADO, FOR WAYFARER.
CONTINUE READING
Watches & Jewellery / Reportage
Edited by Melanie Grant for Phaidon, The Jewelry Book gathers 300 entries across two hundred years, from the great maisons to studio jewellers, and asks a better question than what a jewel is worth: what it changed.
Watches & Jewellery / Reportage
In November 2025 Phillips closed its first decade in Geneva with a white-glove sale of CHF 66.8 million, led by a 1943 steel Patek Philippe ref. 1518 at CHF 14.2 million. Six months later, the same room went higher still.
Watches & Jewellery / Reportage
Maurice Lacroix, Frederique Constant, TAG Heuer and Tissot are returning to solar quartz, with a decade between battery changes and photovoltaic cells hidden beneath translucent dials or the crystal itself.