Gary Oldman can breathe a big, big sigh of relief.
The Oscar-nominated actor reveals to the BBC that he nearly lost the script to The Dark Knight Rises, which would have landed him in hot water with director Christopher Nolan, who along with Warner Bros. has gone to great lengths to keep the plot for the final Batman film in his epic trilogy under wraps.
Don't blame it on the Joker.
"I was in a panic for 20 minutes," Oldman told the news site about the moment he realized he misplaced it. "I thought, 'Where the hell have I put it?' "
He subsequently turned his hotel suite upside down looking for the screenplay, fearing it might fall into the wrong hands and wind up on the Internet, where fanboys would no doubt pick apart the movie's plot details and spoil its release.
"It had my name on it," he noted. "They would have killed me."
Holy freakouts, Batman!
Thankfully, the 53-year-old British thesp, who's reprising his role as Police Commissioner Gordon in TDKR, remembered what he did with it.
"I'd gone out for dinner and I had put it in the room between the mattress and the bed because I couldn't scrunch it into the safe," recalled Oldman. "I was half-thinking about something else and shoved it there."
Oldman, who just nabbed the best-actor prize at the Empire Film Awards for his performance in the Cold War thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, acknowledged the script would have been "the worst one to lose."
Considering The Dark Knight Rises' tagline is "The Legend Ends" and the story chronicles an older Caped Crusader who may have met his match in the über-terrorist genius Bane (played by Tom Hardy), we'd agree with you on that, Gary.
The highly anticipated sequel hits theaters on July 20.