This post contains spoilers for American Horror Story: Cult Episode 5, “Holes.”

We fancy ourselves pretty in-the-know when it comes to American Horror Story’s twists and turns—but this week’s episode ended with a shocker even we didn’t see coming. Dr. Rudy Vincent is Kai Anderson’s brother?! The show hid the truth well, mostly because Ryan Murphy kept us clue-parsers busy looking suspiciously at characters like Ivy and Winter—when Ally Mayfair-Richards’s psychiatrist was actually the most diabolical character of all.

For those wondering, Cheyenne Jackson, who plays Rudy, did not know the twist before the big reveal. “They kind of keep us in the dark—which I love,” Jackson said. “Unless it’s a really important thing that we need to be playing.” Instead, producers gave Jackson oblique hints early in the season, asking him to play certain scenes a little more ambiguously. He knew for sure that something was coming while filming Episode 3, when a producer asked if he’d read the script for Episode 5 yet. That piqued Jackson’s interest, and when the big reveal came, he too was blown away.

“Normally, I can always tell,” Jackson said of the show’s frequent twists. “And I didn’t know. So genius!”

To be fair, Jackson—who will star opposite Alicia Silverstone and Mena Suvari on Paramount Network’s upcoming series American Woman in 2018—admits that he’s tried to stop trying to “solve” TV shows as he makes them. (“I feel like you’re kind of more in the moment, more present, if you just take the material as it comes.”) Still, he also admits that his love for mysteries can get the best of him.

The episode first featured a reveal many A.H.S. die-hards saw coming from a mile away: Ally’s wife, Ivy, who has stood by her (kinda) through all of her clown-filled terror, has been a member of the cult all along. She wants out of her marriage, but, since Ally is their son Oz’s biological mother, she worries she won’t get custody. Enter Kai and his band of freaky clowns, who can terrify Ally into a state of insanity and thus ensure that no judge would ever give her Oz.

But everything gets more complicated as Kai begins to tell Beverly the real story of what happened to his and Winter’s parents, and a third sibling shows up—Rudy, a.k.a. “Vin,” whom Kai once called upon to dispose of their parents’ bodies after their mother shot their father, then herself. Vin’s solution? Put them in bed, cover them in lye, and let the corpses be. As a stolid Beverly puts her hands on a crying Kai’s shoulders, we have a feeling he won’t be the one in charge for much longer.

What should fans take away from this shocking development? “Well,” Jackson says, “the first and most obvious thing is just that [Rudy] is not all that he seems.” No kidding!

“He is ambitious,” Jackson continued. “He really, really cares about how things come across. Image and reputation is paramount. So I think that his jumping into action and taking care of the ‘situation,’ as it were, really is more about just keeping things moving. We’ve got a sister in college; we’ve got a brother; we’ve got to throw everything off; all the money’s going to go away. I think it’s more about problem-solving than being pure evil. Or maybe not!”

This season has been a dizzying romp through paranoia—both Ally’s and our own as we try to parse out who is colluding with whom and to what end. To Jackson, that’s the fun of Cult. And yes, he confirms—there’s plenty of misdirection this season yet to come.