Ray Winstone is opening up about his experience starring in the 2021 Marvel film Black Widow as Russian general Dreykov, the villain to Scarlett Johansson‘s superhero.

But the actor admitted that working with the blockbuster studio can be just “fine” — unless they feel unhappy with your performance.

“It was fine until you have to do the reshoots,” he recently said in an interview with Radio Times. “Then you find out that a few producers have come down, and your performance is too much, it’s too strong… That’s the way Marvel works. It can be soul-destroying, because you feel like you’re doing great work.”

The actor later confessed that he almost quit the project altogether, but ended up staying on because of his contractual obligations.

“I actually said, ‘You ought to recast it because that was it for me.’ And you end up doing it again because you’re contracted to do it. Otherwise you end up in court,” he said. “It’s like being kicked in the balls.”

Winstone is not the first to criticize Marvel’s method of filmmaking. Killers of the Flower Moon director Martin Scorsese recently likened the studio to AI.

“It’s manufactured content. It’s almost like AI making a film. And that doesn’t mean that you don’t have incredible directors and special effects people doing beautiful artwork,” he told GQ in September 2023. “But what does it mean?”

The filmmaker also said it was up to creative directors to save cinema.

“There are going to be generations now that think movies are only those—that’s what movies are. They already think that,” he said. “Which means that we have to then fight back stronger. And it’s got to come from the grassroots level. It’s gotta come from the filmmakers themselves.”