The erstwhile Superman is currently smack dab in the most enjoyable phase of collecting: He knows just enough to speak intelligibly about what he does and doesn’t like, but he’s still green enough to have a whole world of geekery left to discover. There are still so many rabbit holes for him to dive down, YouTube explainers to watch, experts to meet and badger with questions, and grails to add to his wishlist.
For most of his career, Cavill was agnostic about what he put on his wrist, despite being constantly surrounded by fine watches on sets and red carpets. Despite enjoying a little Casio calculator watch as a kid, he mostly resented the pressure to embrace luxury timepieces he felt from business types as his star rose. “I was exposed to watches in a way that was more, ‘Oh, you should be wearing a watch, you should be speaking to these people, and you should be doing that.’” Cavill said. He was often put in watches with “bits moving in the back, lots of gold, and all sorts of sapphires and rubies and emeralds.” These left him cold. “Yeah,” he would mutter, reenacting his disinterest for me, “that’s a fancy watch.”
Now, though, the actor has opinions on how different case sizes look on his wrist and colors he prefers. “Ivories, rose golds, brown straps,” he shared, as if incanting some sort of horological spell. Now, he is threatening to teeter over into the deep end. He’s starting to notice the subtle quirks that drive serious collectors mad, like a turquoise accent that was recently added to Longines’s standard navy blue Hydroconquest. “I’m like, ‘Hold on a second. Why did I not see this one before?’” He’s started looking beyond what’s in the glass cases at Longines and begun asking to see what’s tucked away in the archives. “Show me what you have in the cupboard,” he says. “Let’s have a look at those.”
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