Actor Jonah Hill spotted wearing a Richard Mille

In Adam McKay's apocalyptic satire Don't Look Up (2021), costuming does a great deal of narrative heavy lifting, and nowhere more pointedly than on the wrist of Jonah Hill's character Jason Orlean, the nepotistic White House chief of staff. The production placed a replica of the Richard Mille RM52-01 Skull Tourbillon on his wrist — a watch so extravagant and so visually aggressive that it reads as a costume piece even when it's the real thing.

The Richard Mille RM52-01 was introduced in 2011 as a bold entry in the brand's Art Collection. At its heart is a manual-winding tourbillon caliber — the RM52-01 movement — beating at 21,600 vph with a roughly 48-hour power reserve. The case is constructed in grade 5 titanium with a carbon nanofiber baseplate, keeping overall weight remarkably low despite the visual drama. But the defining feature is the skull motif integrated directly into the movement architecture: the bridges and components are machined to form a three-dimensional skull, visible through both the front sapphire crystal and the open caseback. The case measures approximately 50.00 x 42.70 mm — unapologetically large, in keeping with Richard Mille's design philosophy.

Among collectors, the RM52-01 occupies a specific and somewhat divisive corner of the Richard Mille catalogue. Purists acknowledge the exceptional technical execution — the machining required to render a skull in functioning skeletonized movement parts is genuinely complex — while others view the piece as the brand leaning hard into spectacle over restraint. Either way, its collectibility is not in question: production numbers are extremely limited, and examples rarely surface on the secondary market without significant premiums.

For the Don't Look Up production design team, the choice of the RM52-01 — even in replica form — was clearly intentional. Hill's character is written as a man who weaponizes luxury signifiers, and the skull tourbillon, with its $700,000-plus price tag and baroque visual language, is almost too perfect a prop. It communicates in one glance what pages of dialogue would labor to establish.

On the grey market, genuine RM52-01 examples trade well above retail when they surface, often in the $800,000 to $1,000,000 range depending on provenance and condition. The piece has become a cultural shorthand for extreme-tier conspicuous consumption — a status the Don't Look Up costume department clearly understood and exploited to full effect.