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Actor and designer Aldis Hodge says his path into watchmaking began around age 18 or 19, when he started designing watches while studying architecture. In a 2020 interview, he described a fascination that grew from aesthetics into mechanics—and connected watchmaking to the way people experience and remember time. The interview also captured his A. Hodge Atelier watch in development and his then-recent appointment as a Horological Society of New York trustee; neither source confirms the status of those projects today.
How Aldis Hodge found watchmaking
Hodge did not describe watchmaking as a family trade passed down to him. He told Fratello in 2020 that he began designing watches around age 18 or 19, while he was studying architecture. At first, he was drawn to the visual language of watches; that interest led him to ask how the mechanisms worked.
Architecture gave him a way to think about the relationship between appearance and structure. “A well-known design rule is that form follows function,” Hodge said in the Fratello interview. He described watch design as a meeting point of architecture, art and engineering, a view he also discussed in a 2019 interview with The 1916 Company.
For Hodge, learning to design meant studying watches closely: their shapes, their layouts and the purpose of their components. The mechanism was not a separate technical layer to ignore once the case looked right; it was part of what made the design compelling.
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Why the mechanics matter to him
Hodge’s interest deepened from the outside of the watch inward. In the 2020 interview, he said, “It starts with the physics: how inertia is repurposed and utilized to achieve great mechanical feats with such precision amazes me every day.” His enthusiasm is for the ingenuity of a system in which components work together to measure and display time.
That combination of practical function and visual consequence helps explain his attraction to complex independent watchmaking. A mechanism can change how a watch presents time, and its construction can shape the watch’s entire design. The appeal, in his account, is not complexity for its own sake but the way engineering and expression meet.
The independent watchmakers and watches he admires
Hodge’s interviews name independent makers he finds interesting; they are personal enthusiasms, not a ranking or a set of buying recommendations. In 2019, he mentioned Greubel Forsey, Ludovic Ballouard, François-Paul Journe and Rexhep Rexhepi of Akrivia. In the 2020 Fratello conversation, he also named MB&F, Kari Voutilainen, Urban Jürgensen, Vianney Halter and Hajime Asaoka, among others.
He discussed particular watches and makers he had encountered “in the wild.” That does not establish that he owned every watch he mentioned. The names matter here as clues to what holds his attention: distinctive design and inventive approaches to displaying or mechanically managing time.
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A. Hodge Atelier: what the interviews establish
Hodge’s own watch project developed across several historical snapshots. In a 2016 Interview Magazine profile, he said he hoped to establish a watch line and noted that developing a watch properly could take two, three or even ten years. In 2019, The 1916 Company reported that he was considering two concepts: a retrograde model and a jump-hours design with an asymmetrical case.
By the November 2020 Fratello interview, Hodge said his A. Hodge Atelier watch was being manufactured and that he was anticipating an early prototype. “The kind of watch that gets me most excited is the watch that I’m currently manufacturing under my brand, A. Hodge Atelier,” he said. That statement describes the project’s status at the time of the interview; it does not establish that the watch is now released or available to buy.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why Hodge connects watches with lived time
Hodge’s interest goes beyond the mechanics of telling time. “For me, watchmaking has never been directly about simply telling time. It has always been about how we tell time. About how we experience time,” he told Fratello in 2020.
He sees a watch as a way to mark moments that matter, not merely as an instrument for reading the hour. In the same interview, he said, “I feel that, with watchmaking, we get to engage a greatly nuanced scientific practice that can help people mark the moments in their life that mean the most.” The idea also appears in his 2019 conversation with The 1916 Company: “My idea of, rather, my inspiration for watch design comes from the idea that it’s not so much about telling time. It’s about how people get to experience telling time.”
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Time+Tide reported on July 15, 2020 that Hodge had been appointed a trustee of the Horological Society of New York (HSNY). The article described HSNY as founded in 1866 and focused on its horology education work. The report documents the appointment at that time; the sources cited here do not confirm Hodge’s current trustee status.
Hodge’s interest in the society fits his broader view that watchmaking is a field people can learn to understand, not just admire from a distance. He has spoken about the value of making horology education accessible, particularly to young students. In a separate 2019 Prestige interview, he discussed teaching himself about horology and taking watchmaking classes. His comments place education alongside design and engineering as part of the culture he values around watches.
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