The whole time you’ve been watching Ginny & Georgia, have you been thinking that the actor who plays Marcus was American? Naur, man. Felix Mallard has just mastered an American accent.

As you can hear in the video above, Mallard is actually an Australian, or “Aussie,” as Mallard puts it. “A lot of people don’t realize I’m Australian,” he says. “And apparently that’s because you all bought my American accent.”

In the clip, Mallard breaks down how he nailed filming in an accent entirely foreign to his own. It involves some instrumental vocal exercises he performs every day when he’s shooting the show. “Just warms your mouth up and gets you — me – ready for the day to be an American,” he says.

One of his choice warm-ups? Reciting “around and round the rugged rocks the ragged rascals ran the rural races.” Try saying that five times fast.

At this point, Mallard doesn’t really think about the accent as much on a daily basis, but there are lines that pop up and make him think, “Oh… that’s gonna be hard.” Some of the more difficult words are when a hard R is followed by a consonant. “[Words] like world, girlfriend are all really tough to say,” says Mallard, who stays in an American accent throughout the day on set.

There is one scene that called for Mallard to slip into his native tongue. As you may recall, in the third episode of Season 1, “Next Level Rich People Sh*t,” Marcus and Ginny (Antonia Gentry) share a heart-to-heart in the school locker room during the Sophomore Sleepover. To make Ginny laugh, Marcus tries on an Australian accent to match her attempt at a British one, joking that he’ll “slip another shrimp on the barbie.”

When shooting the scene, Mallard intended to do the accent badly because Marcus is an American and “he wouldn’t nail it,” he says. “In retrospect, watching it back, I think I went really hard with the Australian.”

Watch the video above.

Season 2 of Ginny & Georgia is now streaming.