‘Black Adam’ Star Aldis Hodge Tapped Into a Surprising Passion for His Hawkman Wardrobe

In Hollywood, so-called “multi-hyphenates” tend to take one of a few forms: there are the actor-singers, the actor-dancers, the actor-directors, the director-writers…you get the idea. Yet at the intersection of acting and horology—that is, the art of making watches—is one Aldis Hodge.

The 36-year-old actor and producer, who in recent years has fronted projects including Showtime’s City on a Hill and Regina King’s One Night in Miami…, first fell in love with engineering and design in high school, as an intern at an architecture firm. “When I was 13 to 15, I used to draft blueprints for buildings. That was my main thing,” he recalls. Although his talents as a performer would soon sound the stronger call, the builder and tinkerer in Hodge persisted, leading him eventually to the study and practice of horology—and, in turn, to designing a custom timepiece for Carter Hall, a.k.a. Hawkman, his character in the new DC superhero film Black Adam, starring Dwyane “The Rock” Johnson.

“I have a boutique timepiece company that I’ve been building for a while now,” Hodge explains, “and when this film came about, I was literally in the early stages of [research and development] on my current flagship model. I was talking to my manufacturing partner, and I said, ‘Look, there’s an opportunity.’” Early in Black Adam, Hall sports a stately, gold-faced prototype crafted by Hodge with “a unique dial specific to the film, specific to Carter Hall and Hawkman, to speak to his lineage.” As the comic book lore goes, before he was a founding member of the evil-stopping Justice Society of America, Hall was either an ancient Egyptian prince or a law enforcement officer from the planet Thanagar reincarnated as an archaeologist. It represented a thrilling confluence of Hodge’s greatest passions—and, as luck would have it, a major milestone in his career. “I had been working as a conceptual designer, trying to design my own timepieces, for 15 years at that point, and even though I’ve been in the industry since I was three years old, I had been trying to pursue being a superhero for 15 years,” Hodge says. “Serendipity.”

Yet his hand in Hall’s wardrobe didn’t end there. Beyond being a watch guy, Hodge is also very much a fashion guy, and he leaned into that sensibility on Black Adam. “I think fashion is an aesthetic language. I think it should be definitive and unique,” he says. “So when I was talking to Jaume [Collet-Serra], our director, about Carter Hall’s civilian clothes, I said, ‘I think it should reflect the nature of his cultural acumen and intelligence. He’s been through ages and [a lot] of lives. He’s not gonna be basic.’” With Collet-Serra’s sign-off, Hodge arranged a collaboration between the film’s costumers, Kurt Swanson and Bart Mueller, and designer Waraire Boswell, who counts LeBron James and Jon Batiste as fans of his bespoke suiting. The result was a graphic patterned jacket of Italian and Japanese jacquards that at once nodded to antiquity and cut a dashing modern figure. 

So too did Hodge turn to Boswell for his red carpet looks in New York and London, as the Black Adam cast embarked on a weeks-long promotional tour. “For big events, I like to take risks, but for me it doesn’t mean putting on a big elaborate costume,” Hodge says. “I love tailoring that accentuates the real shape of a man, right? Sometimes, you get a suit that’s completely boxy, and not every man is shaped like a box.” He laughs. “So, I love tailoring that’s sharp, that’s clean, but it always has accents and details that distinguish it from a common suit. If we’re gonna do a double breast or a single button, what does the lapel look like? What story are we telling with the hem of the jacket? How long is it? All of these things, for me, determine what the DNA is.”