Oompa loompa doopity downer. Perennial grump Hugh Grant apparently did not have a jolly good time playing a little orange man in Warner Bros.’ Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory musical prequel Wonka, opposite Timothée Chalamet’s ambitious chocolatier. In a recent press conference, Grant did not mince words when describing his feelings about playing an Oompa Loompa: “I couldn’t have hated the whole thing more.”

Part of Grant’s gripe came down to the shooting process. Wonka director Paul King used motion capture technology in order to shrink Grant down to Oompa Loompa size, which required the Undoing actor to wear a special suit to capture his body movements. “It was like a crown of thorns, very uncomfortable,” said Grant, according to Metro. “I made a big fuss about it. I couldn’t have hated the whole thing more.”

Not only was it physically uncomfortable, but Grant says that he was also somewhat at sea emotionally, as he was never entirely sure how much the camera was capturing. He wasn’t sure, he said, whether to “act with my body or not, and I never received a satisfactory answer.” In his classic self-deprecating fashion, Grant said that “what I did with my body was terrible,” and quipped he’s convinced it’s all “been replaced with an animator.” 

You might be wondering why Grant agreed to be a part of Wonka in the first place, given his aversion to basic aspects of the gig. “I slightly hate [making films], but I have lots of children and need money,” he said at the press conference. While his evident distaste for Hollywood is quite clear from his recent spate of public appearances, Grant had some specific complaints about the use of CGI in the film, and the use of CGI in the entertainment industry more broadly. “It’s very confusing. With CGI now, you can’t tell what’s going on,” he said. Grant went on to share an anecdote in which his father turned to him during his previous film collaboration with King, Paddington 2, and asked, “Is that a real bear?”

For the record, according to King, Grant was cast in the Wonka film because of his wicked sense of humor. In Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Oompa Loompas are “incredibly sarcastic and judgmental and cruel,” the director said. “So I was really just thinking about that character; somebody who could be a real shit, and then—ah, Hugh!”

So, in spite of—or perhaps because of—his sour attitude, Grant delivers a performance that ultimately works. Vanity Fair’s chief critic Richard Lawson found Wonka, starring Grant, Chalamet, Olivia Colman, Keegan-Michael Key, and Sally Hawkins to be “surprisingly scrumdiddlyumptious,” with Grant “impressively maintaining his dignity” as an Oompa Loompa. Does Grant feel that the pain was worth the final, critically well-received product? “Not really,” he said at the press conference. But he was able to admit that he had at least a little fun improvising on set, saying it was “quite fun, messing around and trying new lines.” Whatever Grant may have you believe, it clearly wasn’t all bad.