The potential of a romance between Stan Rizzo and Peggy Olson on Mad Men had become clear enough in the final few episodes that many of us started rooting for them to get together—even if we firmly believed the show would never be kind enough to actually let it happen. But maybe the reason we were so invested in their relationship was because the seeds had been sown many, many years ago—without creator Matthew Weiner actually intending it.

Talking to The Wall Street Journal and finally free of Mad Men’s ironclad confidentiality agreements, Jay R. Ferguson, who played Stan, says that Weiner gave him a firm “no” when he asked if Stan and Peggy would ever get together . . . but Ferguson wasn’t really willing to take that as an answer. “Every chance I got I would always try to put in a little nuance—a look or an intention in a word—to leave that door open on the stuff they gave me with Lizzie. I was trying to pull my own secret coup.” And though Ferguson credits the show’s writers for talking Weiner into giving Stan and Peggy their happy ending sometime during Season 6, he also says, “I like to believe that in some tiny way I helped it come to pass.”

Though the moment, in the way of so many on-screen love scenes, wasn’t quite as romantic in real life as it seemed on the show. “Poor Lizzie, it’s such a great moment for her but you can barely see it because of all the hair that is on my head,” Ferguson said about Elisabeth Moss. “Lizzie was unfortunately picking beard hairs out of her mouth for months.”

Was her sacrifice worth it for the thrill of seeing this happen? Come on, of course it was.