How Henry Golding Found His ‘Holy Grail’ Cartier for Met Gala 2025

Over Zoom, Golding shows me just a single page of a PDF provided by Cartier with over a dozen watch options on it. There are several factors to consider. The first is what goes best with his Boateng look. This will remain a mystery until close to gametime. Golding will get into his suit on Monday night and start trying on different pieces from Cartier’s spread. The second factor is his own taste: “I’m traditionally more of a slimmer watch and a smaller bezel kind of guy,” he explained. “I think they look better with suits.”

With all those factors in mind, Golding has whittled his choices down to just two possibilities. The first is a yellow-gold Santos. “It’s a beautiful classic watch,” Golding says, adding that he believes it looks particularly good with a suit. But the second model is one the actor describes as his “last holy grail in watches.” Early last month, at Watches and Wonders, Cartier announced the revival of one of its most distinctive archival designs. The new Tank à Guichet, which the jeweler originally released in 1928, hardly resembles your typical timepiece. Instead, the watch looks like a Hershey’s chocolate square of precious metal (the trio of new Guichets come in gold, rose gold, and platinum) with just two tiny apertures that indicate the time.

The Guichet was on Golding’s radar long before he ever considered what he might wear to the Met. Even during our interview, he speaks gingerly and carefully about the watch, as if he’s afraid to scare it away. “There’s, like, one Cartier watch that I’m…like, I need. And it’s very rare that I find a [watch] that I’m, like, no matter what, I need to get hold of that.”

In Golding’s view, there are two main types of watches. “There are the expensive watches, and then there are the collector’s watches,” he says, sounding like he’d fit right in at a geeky watch meetup. The former, he explains, comprise the sparkly, bedazzled pieces meant to appeal to folks with unlimited money: “You’ve just spent out your butthole for a crazy timepiece,” Golding says, “which is amazing, sure. But [does it have a] history? [Does it show] your knowledge of what horology is all about?” True collector’s watches, by contrast, “don’t have to be the most expensive, but they are hard to get, hard to track, hard to find, and have more of a story than just, ‘I got this looking shiny watch.’” Golding points to Tyler, the Creator as someone whose collection epitomizes this latter philosophy.