“Bridgerton” star Nicola Coughlan told Elle UK magazine that she was once confronted by a drunk fan of the Netflix smash hit while in a bathroom. The inebriated woman proceeded to openly discuss Coughlan’s body while right in front of her much to the actor’s dismay. Coughlan plays Penelope on the Netflix series, with the show’s third season focusing on her love story with Colin Bridgerton.
“You know what was really bizarre was, when I was shooting that series, I was exercising a lot because I knew I had to, so I had lost a bunch of weight – I was probably a size 10 and one of the corsets was a size 8,” Coughlan told Elle about Season 3. “And then people talked about how I was plus size and I was like, ‘How fucked are we that I am the biggest woman you want to see on screen?’”
‘I remember this really drunk girl once talking to me in a bathroom being like, ‘I loved [“Bridgerton”] because of your body,’” she continued. “And she started talking about my body, and I was like, ‘I want to die. I hate this so much…’ It’s really hard when you work on something for months and months of your life, you don’t see your family, you really dedicate yourself and then it comes down to what you look like – it’s so fucking boring.”
Coughlan has regularly spoken out against body shamers during her run on “Bridgerton,” which recently streamed its fourth season. She directly called them out in a 2022 Instagram post that read: “If you have an opinion about my body please, please don’t share it with me…It’s really hard to take the weight of thousands of opinions on how you look being sent directly to you every day.”
She later told the Irish Times: “All I care about is the work. Bodies change, if I lose weight or gain weight or I do anything it’s no one’s business, all I care about is doing good acting and being judged on that.”
Coughlan told Stylist in 2024 amid the release of “Bridgerton” Season 3 that she was adamant about going “very naked” for a sex scene as a direct response to the trolls who slammed her weight online. Coughlan collaborated closely with “Bridgerton” intimacy coordinator Lizzy Talbot on the scene.
“I specifically asked for certain lines and moments to be included,” Coughlan said. “There’s one scene where I’m very naked on camera, and that was my idea, my choice. It just felt like the biggest ‘fuck you’ to all the conversation surrounding my body; it was amazingly empowering. I felt beautiful in the moment, and I thought: ‘When I’m 80, I want to look back on this and remember how fucking hot I looked!’”
Head over to Elle’s website to read Coughlan’s cover in its entirety.
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