Gary Oldman Nearly Fouled Up 'Dark Knight Rises' Secrecy

Warner Bros. and director Christopher Nolan haven't just kept a tight lid upon "The Dark Knight Rises". They bolted that sucker onto Nolan's "Dark Knight" finale.

Gary Oldman then nearly handed fans across the Internet a blowtorch to cut that lid off.

Oldman, who's played Batman's sometimes-lone ally Commissioner Jim Gordon in "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight" before this year's last installment, admittedly once misplaced his "Dark Knight Rises" script and couldn't imagine briefly where it had gone, he told the BBC recently.

"I was in a panic for 20 minutes," Oldman said, recalling some tense moments ravaging his hotel room and praying the Internet hadn't already bitten into it. "I thought, 'Where the hell have I put it?' . . . It had my name on it. They would have killed me."

Oldman admits the script would've been "the worst one to lose". Fan-shot videos and photos from location shoots aside, Warner Bros. and Nolan have obsessively kept the set tight as a drum. Finally, Oldman did remember where he'd placed the script - which, it should be added, would've indeed been where an unscrupulous housekeeper could have indeed found some buried treasure while swapping out the sheets.

"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," Oldman recalled. "I was half-thinking about something else and shoved it there."

From what has been revealed with Nolan's consent - and the film's "The Legends Ends" tagline - it appears that "The Dark Knight Rises" may incorporate at the very least a few elements of the "Broken Bat" storyline in which Bane (played in the film by Tom Hardy) snaps Batman's back across his knee, temporarily crippling the Christian Bale-portrayed Caped Crusader.

The film hits theaters everywhere July 20.