“It’s Deadline Hollywood, so I’m going to set the record straight,” Gary Oldman said during an interview on Friday at Deadline’s Toronto Film Festival studio.

He was, of course, referring to the recent furor around some off-the-cuff remarks he made about the casting of James Bond in a recent interview, and the resulting speculation that Oldman’s Slow Horses co-star Jack Lowden might be the new 007 in the upcoming Denis Villeneuve-directed Bond film.

Oldman told Deadline his words had been entirely misconstrued and spun into suggestive headlines by the media. And that he’d relayed that fact to Lowden on the phone.

Oldman smiled as he recalled the conversation. “What did Jack say? He said ‘Oh, they do that kind of thing, the f*ckers.'”

Here’s the official setting straight of the record from Oldman: “A Canadian journalist [from the outlet Global] asked me about Jack Lowden and the James Bond connection. I did not bring this up. I did not offer this up. She said, ‘So how do you feel about it?’ So I said, ‘Well, they got the six guys because they published the picture of the contenders for the role.’ I said, ‘Rumor has it that they picked someone, but they’ve not announced it yet. And fingers crossed for Jack.’ And they made it sound like I had a hotline to Denis [Villeneuve]! And he was feeding me the information. So they took it to the very edge of misquoting me, moved things around like they do, and it became a headline.”

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Oldman was in Toronto with some of the Slow Horses team (sans Lowden) as part of TIFF’s Primetime lineup, which spotlights television. With him at the Deadline studio were Saskia Reeves, Christopher Chung, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Ruth Bradley and director Adam Randall.

“We’re rooting for him, aren’t we?” Oldman said of Lowden. Looking around the room at the Slow Horses team, he received vigorous nods all round.

Slow Horses Season 6 drops September 16 on Apple TV, with production already ramping up for Season 7. In Season 6, which is based on the sixth and seventh books of Mick Herron’s Slough House series titled Joe Country and Slough House, we’ll see Oldman’s character Jackson Lamb galvanized into action when he realizes the Slow Horses are being systematically targeted and Lowden’s character River will face the return of not one, but two significant figures from the past.

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As for Bond, the ultimate casting mystery remains unsolved. Alongside Lowden, the list of rumored contenders includes Callum Turner, Dev Patel, Paul Mescal, Jacob Elordi, Harris Dickinson and Jack Barton.