It is difficult to believe now, but almost two decades ago The New York Times was fretting about Ryan Gosling being typecast. He had just appeared in the three-hanky weepie sleeper hit The Notebook (2004) and was poised to reach escape velocity for full celluloid stardom. The paper, however, suggested that if he wasn’t careful, Hollywood would make sure Gosling had a future confined to melodramas and rom-coms.

Clearly, it hadn’t been paying attention to the Canadian actor’s career. He had rung the changes even by the time he was in his very early 20s, from being a Disney Mouseketeer (alongside Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears) through TV’s Young Hercules (his stunt-bike rider/bank robber in 2012’s The Place Beyond the Pines wasn’t the first time he had bulked up for a part) to his startling breakthrough turn as a “Jewish Nazi” in The Believer (2001). Wrongfooting The Times, he followed up The Notebook with roles as a depressed art student (Stay, 2005), a high-school teacher with a drug habit (Half Nelson, 2006, which earned him his first Oscar nomination) and a man who falls in love with a silicone sex doll (Lars and the Real Girl, 2007). Typecast? Hardly. A cinematic chameleon? Definitely.

Since then, Gosling has become as close as we have to an old-fashioned movie star. He has been compared to his early hero Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen (Gosling does his own stunt work with cars and bikes, like McQueen, and has access to the same ultra-cool charisma) and, given his penchant for parts that involve little dialogue – in films such as Drive (2011) and Only God Forgives (2013) – Clint Eastwood.

Gosling returned to the (small) screen this year with the Russo brothers’ The Gray Man for Netflix, as hit man Sierra Six. It’s a less po-faced, hyper-kinetic Bourne-type thriller. He is positively voluble, with almost as many droll quips as he has bullets, and has an interesting co-star. No, not scenery-chewer-in-chief Chris Evans, or hard-ass ninja-like Ana de Armas. It’s Sierra Six’s watch.

This constant companion makes a bold entrance early on, in the scenes set in Bangkok, when Six is in his loud red suit (a nice match for the brown leather strap). The silver-dialled wristwatch is simple, elegant, and refreshingly devoid of spinning bezels, lasers or hidden grappling hooks. The dial is clear, uncluttered by anything other than a discreet date window, and is easily read at first glance. It tells the time. It shows the date. That’s it. Apart from the fact that, like Sierra Six, it is also remarkably tough.

In the course of the mayhem that Sierra Six creates, his watch survives falling from a cargo plane, a leap from a shot-up runaway tram, two grenade explosions, bone-crunching fist fights, being abraded by handcuffs during a gun battle that takes out most of central Prague and submersion in both a castle moat and a well. In fact, given that Sierra Six ends up beaten, burnt, bloodied and very much shot, the timepiece makes it through in much better nick than its owner.

This apparently indestructible wristwatch is a TAG Heuer Carrera Three Hands, a model first introduced in the early 2000s. Gosling sports the latest incarnation, which has re-designed hands and indices, and it lives up to TAG’s motto that its products “Don’t Crack Under Pressure”.

The new Three Hands is, of course, the latest in a line of TAG Heuer timepieces bearing the name Carrera. TAG Heuer has long and deep roots in motorsport going back to the early 20th century and the racing heritage is where the company’s over-arching obsession with clarity and readability for the Carrera began. Legend has it that in 1958 Jack Heuer, the fourth generation of the family to run the business, dropped from first to third in a Swiss rally he was competing in because he could not read the dashboard timer correctly. Disappointed with himself and the clock, Heuer subsequently set about re-designing the company’s race and aviation products to improve their lucidity. He applied the same parameters to the Carrera, which was introduced five years later, and demonstrated a sleek, very minimalist approach to design that aimed for maximum legibility, a philosophy that continues through to this day. The name comes from motorsport, too – the gruelling and dangerous Carrera Panamericana road of the ’50s.

Gosling is an ambassador for the brand, in a relatively recent partnership that dates back to 2021. Judging from what he wears on the red carpet and at press conferences, the actor owns Carrera Three Hands timepieces (there are 13 variations available across four re-imagined versions from 29mm to 41mm in diameter). And it’s a fair assumption that he treats them with more respect than Sierra Six does. ‘I appreciate its timeless design,’ he has said of the Carrera.
‘I like clean and simple design generally.’

Next up is another career swerve, appearing in the Barbie movie as Ken and as another stuntman in The Fall Guy, but we would also like to see him try his hand at directing once more. His directorial debut Lost River (2014) may have been a little too much in thrall to Drive’s Nicolas Winding Refn and the works of David Lynch, but it took Clint Eastwood a while to shrug off the influence of Sergio Leone and Don Siegel and find his own voice. There was enough visual flair and cinematic sensibility in Lost River to suggest Gosling should get behind the camera again. After all, despite a lengthy acting career, the Canadian is still a young man, only just coming up on 42. And as his Carrera Three Hands will doubtless tell him, there’s plenty of time yet.

TAG Heuer Carrera Three Hands, from £2,400; tagheuer.com