As we eagerly await more news about the currently airing second season of The Newsroom, John Gallagher Jr. recently made an appearance on NPR and talked all about rehearsing for The Newsroom and the infamous season 1 pratfalls.

John Gallagher Jr. made an appearance on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross to discuss his career and all of its highlights, including his work on Broadway in Spring Awakening and American Idiot as well as his newest day job, playing Jim Harper on The Newsroom.

In response to a question about rehearsing for The Newsroom, Gallagher Jr. had this to say: “It’s hard because usually most of the rehearsal happens when I’m alone at home in my apartment. I’ll work on the scenes; I’ll walk around; I’ll try to say them out loud.”

Gallagher Jr. also shares a cool tip that he uses to get the dialogue into his head, “Sometimes I’ll record myself saying all of the lines, even the characters that aren’t mine, and I’ll listen to that while I’m doing dishes or cooking dinner, doing something else just so that I’m trying to get it in my head in a way that doesn’t feel like work.”

He goes on to say that with not a lot of rehearsal time, at least Sorkin had some advice on how to get through his notoriously verbose scripts, “You have to kind of compartmentalize and learn a lot for one particular day, and you only really get a couple of times to rehearse them with your co-stars. So day one of season one of The Newsroom, one of the things Aaron Sorkin said to us, he said, ‘The more rehearsed and prepared you show up in the morning, the happier and more confident you’re going to be about your performance.'”

He later talks all about the notorious pratfalls from season 1, particularly the memorable first scene,

“I remember in particular there’s a pratfall that Bill Murray does in the movie Scrooged that is one of the most amazing fake falls that I’d ever seen. So moments like that, I would start practicing those in my room and seeing how real I could make it look. When I got the script and realized that, ‘Oh, my first moment in this pilot is running into the room and completely falling over.’ … But that goes back to … you’ll see elements of screwball comedy peppered into [Aaron Sorkin’s] work all the time.”

You can catch the latest episode of The Newsroom season 2 Sunday nights at 10pm on HBO.