FOSSIL Coachman “Uncharted”

The Fossil Coachman Chronograph CH2565: a forty-five-millimetre American chronograph, a video game made flesh, and the watch Tom Holland wears on the Uncharted movie.

In Ruben Fleischer’s Uncharted (2022), Tom Holland plays Nathan Drake — a bartender-turned-fortune-hunter pulled into a global quest for Magellan’s lost gold — and wears the Fossil Coachman Chronograph CH2565 throughout. What elevates it beyond ordinary prop work is its appearance on the official movie poster: an image composed with deliberate precision, every element reviewed and approved before print. A watch that passes that filter is doing active narrative work.

The choice is coherent. Drake, in both the PlayStation game series and Holland’s interpretation, is a specific kind of hero: resourceful, aesthetically self-aware without being vain, the sort of person who wears a proper chronograph not to signal wealth but because he genuinely likes the look of it. The CH2565 fits that profile without forcing it. It looks like a watch somebody actually owns.

Fossil: Texas, Hong Kong, and the Retro Instinct

Fossil was founded in 1984 by Tom Kartsotis, a Texas A&M dropout who had been running a ticket brokerage in Dallas. On his brother Kosta’s suggestion, he withdrew his savings, flew to Hong Kong, commissioned 1,500 watches from a local manufacturer, and sold them to Dallas department stores. The company was initially called Overseas Products International. The name Fossil — a nickname the brothers had for their father — arrived later, as the brand’s design identity crystallised around a single powerful insight: American consumers in the 1980s were susceptible to a specific kind of designed nostalgia.

Kartsotis and his designer Lynne Stafford spent hours poring over old issues of Look, Life, and Time from the 1930s through the 1950s, studying the advertisements and the graphic sensibility of an era their customers hadn’t lived through but felt they recognised. From this came a design vocabulary — warm tones, retro dials, American iconography, the feel of something that had existed for decades even when brand new — that resonated immediately. By 1989, five years after that first shipment of 1,500 watches, Fossil was generating $20 million a year. It had identified a gap the Swiss establishment hadn’t bothered with and the Japanese mass market hadn’t thought to fill: fashionable, personality-driven watches at accessible prices, positioned not against Rolex but against Swatch — and winning on warmth, wit, and backstory.

The Coachman CH2565: Big, Brown, and Deliberate

The CH2565 is a 45mm stainless steel chronograph with a tan-brown dial carrying wood-effect accents — a texture and warmth entirely unlike the flat, cold faces most fashion chronographs default to. Three subdials handle the chronograph functions in the classic triple-register layout: sixty seconds, sixty minutes, and a 24-hour indicator. A date window sits between four and five o’clock. Luminescent hands and markers, a tachymeter scale around the bezel ring, and a hardened mineral crystal complete a specification that reads as purposeful without pretending to be professional.

The brown genuine leather strap is wide and flat — a cuff, in the category’s terminology — with silver-tone stud detail that reads as cowboy-adjacent, entirely consistent with the Coachman name and Fossil’s American-West design vocabulary. At 12mm thick and 100 metres water-resistant, this is a watch built for presence and legibility rather than subtlety. On Holland’s wrist, which is not a large wrist, it commands the frame.

The movement is quartz. This is worth stating plainly: the CH2565 makes no claim to mechanical complexity, and the Coachman line has never pretended otherwise. What it offers instead is design coherence, reliable timekeeping, and a face that looks like it has somewhere to be. For Nathan Drake — a man who grabs what works and wears it until it breaks — this is precisely the right watch. A vintage Heuer would imply a collector’s budget and a collector’s temperament. A Fossil Coachman implies someone who walked past a display case, saw something that looked like it meant business, and bought it.

From Pixels to Poster

The Uncharted games never licensed a real brand, leaving Drake’s watch as a suggestive shape — a leather-strapped chronograph with a warm dial and a large case — rather than a specific object. When the film resolved that ambiguity, the CH2565 was the answer: a watch that matched the game’s visual vocabulary, fit the character’s economic profile, and was prominent enough to read on screen and, as it turned out, on a poster.

The Fossil Coachman CH2565 was never designed to be iconic. It was designed to be well-made, characterful, and affordable. That it became the Nathan Drake watch — visible on Holland’s wrist in a film that opened to over $148 million globally in its first weekend — is the kind of outcome that cannot be engineered. It can only be deserved.

Technical note: Fossil Coachman Chronograph CH2565 — Stainless steel case, 45mm diameter, 12mm thickness; fixed bezel with tachymeter scale; tan/brown dial with wood-effect accents, three chronograph subdials (60-second, 60-minute, 24-hour), date at 4–5 o’clock; luminescent hands and markers; hardened mineral crystal; quartz chronograph movement; 100m water resistance. Brown genuine leather cuff strap, 22mm, tang buckle.