“I didn’t really know how I was gonna do it until I got there,” Josh Duhamel admits of his proposal to Audra Mari

Josh Duhamel pulled off an epic proposal for his now-fiancée Audra Mari, but he had to get creative when it didn’t go exactly as planned.

Speaking with Access‘ Mario Lopez and Kit Hoover for a chat published Thursday, the Shotgun Wedding actor said he knew he wanted to propose on a specific sandbar at the beach, but admitted, “I didn’t really know how I was gonna do it until I got there.”

“Then that morning, it kinda hit me — I was like, ‘You know what? You guys have any empty bottles around here?’ And I went and talked to the concierge,” said Duhamel, 49.

“So we planned it all out — I was gonna walk her down there as this thing was floating up,” he shared.

Audra Mari and Josh Duhamel.Josh Duhamel/Instagram

But when he and Mari, 28, reached the spot, “the bottle wasn’t there,” Duhamel recalled — so he had to do some quick thinking.

“I turned around and made up another story about like, ‘You know what? Let’s play some cornhole.’ [She was like], ‘I’m in heels. I don’t wanna play [cornhole],’ ” he said.

And luckily, the diversion was short-lived. “By the time we got back, the bottle was sitting there. I said, ‘Hey, there’s a bottle!’ ” Duhamel said.

Asked what makes Mari “the one,” the Love, Simon actor replied, “She’s a very sweet girl. Very similar interests — we’re from North Dakota, we love lake life. She’s got a cabin not far from mine. We just match. She’s an amazing person.”

Duhamel announced his engagement to Mari in an Instagram post earlier this month, with a photo of the couple posing on the sandbar.

“It’s on!! She found a message in a bottle that washed ashore and said YES!! @audramari,” the actor captioned the shot of the pair smiling, while he held up a handwritten letter that read, “Audra Diane Mari Will You Marry Me?”

Duhamel’s ex-wife Fergie celebrated the couple in the comment section, writing, “Congrats!!!💚💚💚💚💚💚.”

In December 2019, a source told PEOPLE that Duhamel was “really happy” with the former Miss World America, whom he’d begun “dating seven or eight months” prior.