The Rolex Cellini ref. 3805/8: the 18-carat yellow gold rectangular dress watch from Rolex’s dedicated non-Oyster line, named after the Florentine Renaissance goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini and produced from 1968 until its discontinuation in 2023, worn by Wagner Moura as Pablo Escobar across the first two seasons of the Netflix series Narcos (2015 to 2016), where a watch from Rolex’s most restrained and aesthetically refined line is placed on the wrist of the most violent and unrestrained character in the show.
José Padilha and Chris Brancato’s Narcos premiered on Netflix on August 28, 2015, covering the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar and the Medellín Cartel from the late 1970s through Escobar’s death in December 1993. It was narrated by DEA agent Steve Murphy, played by Boyd Holbrook, and co-starred Pedro Pascal as Javier Peña. Wagner Moura, the Brazilian actor who had previously played the police captain Nascimento in the Elite Squad films, played Escobar for the first two seasons, earning a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Drama Series at the 73rd ceremony.
The watch on Escobar’s wrist throughout the series is a subject that the collector community has approached with the care it deserves, given the constraints. The watch appears on screen without close-ups of sufficient resolution to resolve the question definitively. WristEnthusiast’s forensic analysis, the most thorough published examination, identified the watch as most likely a vintage Rolex Cellini ref. 3805/8, an 18-carat yellow gold rectangular watch from the 1970s, on the basis of four visible characteristics: the case is rectangular with curved bulges on each side, the dial and case are both gold, there is no crownguard, and the lug shape and length are consistent with the 3805 family. An Omega De Ville Quartz was also considered as a candidate. The identification as a Lanco, noted by Spotern for one specific scene, may refer to a different watch in a different episode. The balance of collector opinion settles on the Cellini.
The Spotern community’s Lanco identification aside, the narrative coherence of the Cellini choice is strong. A rectangular gold dress watch on the wrist of a man who had grown up in poverty in Antioquia and was, by the mid-1980s, one of the wealthiest and most dangerous individuals in the western hemisphere, is a specific and precise costume decision: Escobar wearing the refinement he had purchased, an object that belongs to the world of established Latin American wealth rather than the ostentatious gold he might have been expected to acquire.
More on the series: imdb.com/title/tt2707408
The Cellini and the Renaissance Goldsmith
The Rolex Cellini line takes its name from Benvenuto Cellini, born in Florence in 1500 and died there in 1571, a goldsmith, sculptor, medallist, and autobiographer whose career moved between papal courts, royal patrons, and intermittent imprisonments with an energy that his autobiography, the Vita, records in extraordinary and frequently unreliable detail. His masterpiece, the gold-and-enamel Saliera salt cellar made for King Francis I of France between 1540 and 1543, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, represents the extreme of what European goldsmithing could achieve in the sixteenth century: a table object of mythological complexity made from materials of the highest value by techniques that no subsequent maker has fully replicated. When Francis I saw it completed, he reportedly gasped.
The name was proposed by René-Paul Jeanneret, Rolex’s Director of Marketing in the early 1960s and a close confidant of founder Hans Wilsdorf, who conceived the Cellini line as a deliberate counter-programme to Rolex’s established identity. By 1960, the year Wilsdorf died and André Heiniger took over alongside Jeanneret, Rolex had built its commercial reputation entirely on professional tool watches: the Submariner for divers, the GMT-Master for airline pilots, the Daytona for racing drivers, the Explorer for mountaineers. These watches were certified, water-resistant, shock-resistant, and deliberately functional. They were not dress watches. Jeanneret’s idea was to create a line that was exclusively dress watches, made entirely from precious metals, without Oyster cases, without screw-down crowns, without any of the functional apparatus that made Rolex famous, and named after the most celebrated goldsmith in the western tradition.
The first Cellini watches appeared in 1968. They were slim gold dress watches with time-only dials, powered by manual-winding movements. The 18-carat gold case and dial were standard from the beginning; stainless steel was never used in the Cellini line across its entire 55-year production history. The collection was discontinued in 2023.
The Ref. 3805 and Its Family
The Rolex Cellini ref. 3805 is a 1970s rectangular yellow gold dress watch housing the Calibre 1600, a manually wound movement that Rolex used across its non-Oyster dress range in the period. The case is approximately 31mm long and 23mm wide, with the curved bulges on the sides of the rectangular case that WristEnthusiast identified as one of the key features visible in the Narcos footage. The dial is champagne or Roman numeral white gold, without hour markers in some variants, relying instead on the hands alone for time indication. There is no crown guard. The lugs are elongated and slightly angled. The strap is black alligator leather with a gold deployant buckle or pin buckle depending on configuration.
The 3805 family sits within the broader Cellini rectangular reference group that Rolex produced through the 1970s and 1980s, including the ref. 3806, 3807, and 3808, each with variations in case proportions and dial configuration. The 3805/8 designation noted by WristEnthusiast refers to a specific variant within the family with a champagne dial and yellow gold case, the configuration most consistent with what is visible in the Narcos footage.
By 2014, when Rolex redesigned the entire Cellini line under a new unified architecture with 39mm round cases, double-stepped bezels, and flared crowns, the rectangular references of the 1970s and 1980s had been out of production for decades. The contemporary Cellini Time, Cellini Date, and Cellini Moonphase that constituted the modern line until the collection’s discontinuation in 2023 were a different proposition entirely: larger, rounder, more consistent with the contemporary luxury market. The vintage rectangular Cellinis, which the Narcos costume department reached for to dress Escobar, belong to the older and rarer expression of what Jeanneret had imagined as Rolex’s contribution to pure watchmaking elegance.
What Escobar Actually Wore
The real Pablo Escobar’s watch preferences are documented in photographs and are not subtle. He wore Rolex Day-Dates, the gold-cased, gold-dialled President-braceleted model that the watchmaking world calls the drug lord’s Rolex for reasons that documentary photographs of the mid-1980s Colombian drug trade make self-evident. The Day-Date is large, gold, immediately legible as expensive, and specifically associated with the display of wealth and status in contexts where the display of wealth and status serves a social function.
The Cellini ref. 3805/8 is the opposite of this. It is small, rectangular, restrained, and associated with the kind of established old money that does not need to announce itself. The costume decision in Narcos to put the smaller, quieter, more refined Cellini on Escobar’s wrist rather than the historically accurate Day-Date is a choice that says something about how the show’s costume department understood the character they were building: a man who wanted to be taken seriously as a legitimate figure in Colombian society, not merely as the most powerful criminal in the country. The Cellini is the watch of that aspiration. The Day-Date is the watch of the reality.
More on the Rolex Cellini’s history: teddybaldassarre.com/en-int/blogs/watches/rolex-cellini and on Escobar’s watches: wristenthusiast.com/latest/2021/9/21/from-narcos-to-goodfellas-the-watches-worn-by-actors-when-portraying-gangsters-in-fiction-and-film
Technical note: Rolex Cellini, most probably ref. 3805/8, 1970s production. 18-carat yellow gold rectangular case, approximately 31mm x 23mm, with curved bulges on lateral sides. No crown guard. Champagne or Roman numeral dial. Calibre 1600, manually wound movement. Black alligator leather strap. The watch identification in Narcos is not definitively confirmed: WristEnthusiast considers the Cellini ref. 3805/8 the most probable candidate on the basis of case shape, absence of crown guard, lug profile, and all-gold construction; an Omega De Ville Quartz was also considered. The Rolex Cellini line was conceived by Rolex Marketing Director René-Paul Jeanneret in the early 1960s, first produced 1968, and discontinued 2023 after 55 years of continuous production. Named after Florentine Renaissance goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, 1500 to 1571. Produced exclusively in precious metals throughout its history; no stainless steel was ever used. Worn by Wagner Moura as Pablo Escobar in Narcos, Netflix, Seasons 1 and 2, 2015 to 2016. The historical Pablo Escobar wore Rolex Day-Date models; the Cellini is a costume department choice that diverges from the historical record.
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€7 500
Movie Year:
2015
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