When it comes to Days of Our Lives, nothing should surprise us. This is, after all, a soap on which leading lady Marlena has been possessed by the devil… twice. Over the years, the writers have buried people alive and relocated basically the entire population to Gilligan’s Island  Melaswen.

Yet we were still taken aback by what went down this week, as it was revealed that Connie’s not simply talking to an imaginary version of Li but rather a cardboard cutout. “That was a shock, when I got that script,” admits Connie’s portrayer, Julie Dove. “I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ I mean, I was acting with a cardboard cutout! He’s not just standing there, I’m talking to him! So that was a first for me as an actor.”

More: Behind the latest Dance Moms feud

How, exactly, does one handle such an odd challenge? “I played it as if Remington [Hoffman] was there,” Dove says of Li’s flesh-and-blood alter ego. And while delivering what she calls “Connielogues,” the actress says she “took a lot of time, as if Remington was talking back to me and reacting. That’s just kind of how you’re trained to do a monologue, is you’ve got to be listening to the other person, even though they’re not there.”

Up until this week, the scenes in which Connie talked to Li — whom she murdered — featured his real-life portrayer talking back. In fact, we at one point speculated that perhaps Li was alive and well and hiding out in the apartment with a clueless Connie. But Dove says that this latest reveal “is a great progression of her deteriorating mental state.”

And how did the actress react upon seeing the cutout referenced in a script? “It was a great reveal,” she admits. “I was reading it and I was just like, ‘Whoa!’”