Saif Ali Khan isn't in the mood to defend everything on his resume. In a new conversation with Gulf News, the actor looked back at two films from his career and landed on the same word for one of them: mistake.

Cocktail, the 2012 film that paired him with Deepika Padukone and Diana Penty, is the one he's most direct about. "I did the part because we were producing it," Saif said. "It was an inevitable mistake, 100 per cent that was a mistake, and that was a slightly regressive script choice. Otherwise, it was a breezy, fun entertainer."

Worth sitting with that for a second. Saif wasn't just an actor on Cocktail, he was a producer with money and a release date riding on the film actually getting made. That, by his own account, is the reason he ended up playing the lead rather than the part he actually found interesting. "I didn't do it for the role," he said. "I did it so the film could get made. You do things for various reasons. I knew fully well that the exciting role is the Veronica part but it's one of those things you do anyway."

Veronica, played by Deepika, was the character that walked away with most of the film's memory value. Saif seems to know that better than anyone.

The Humshakals confession

The actor didn't stop at Cocktail. Asked about Humshakals, Sajid Khan's 2014 comedy that landed among the more punished films of his filmography, Saif put the blame on casting rather than the script itself.

"I personally think that I was a miscast in Humshakals because it's not my thing," he said. "Certain actors could really pull that off, and you need a kind of commitment and the ability to make people laugh on a very slightly different level, which perhaps I wasn't able to convince myself to do or wasn't just basically good enough in it."

He went further, suggesting Sajid Khan may have wanted a different kind of performance from him altogether. "I think Sajid expected me to do that stuff, perhaps, like Akshay Kumar could have done it, that was the mistake. But I stand by the movie, and I stand by him, and of course, we have to all stand by our movies," Saif said.

It's a rare bit of self-assessment from an actor usually careful with how he talks about his own work, made rarer by the fact that Akshay Kumar is currently sharing a screen with him again. The two star together in Haiwaan, Priyadarshan's crime thriller with Shriya Pilgaonkar and Saiyami Kher, which opens in theatres on September 11.

Whether Saif revisits any more of his back catalogue before the Haiwaan press run wraps up remains to be seen. For now, Cocktail and Humshakals have their verdicts, straight from the man who was in them.