On Friends, Rachel’s Italian boyfriend Paolo made his mark as a smooth-talking Casanova — and turns out, his lines were almost all ad-libbed.

“I was asked to improvise,” Fusco recently told the Today show in honor of the beloved sitcom’s upcoming 25th anniversary. “I was a little bit skeptical, because my English then wasn’t as good as it is now, let’s face it. But I was told not to speak any English. ‘Just say whatever you want in Italian.'”