Nicola Coughlan has said that constantly facing trolling over her body is “so fucking boring”.
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The Bridgerton actress has been subjected to body shaming throughout her career, but particularly when her character Penelope was one of the focal characters of the popular romance drama’s third season and appeared in nude scenes.
In an interview with Elle, Coughlan recounted an encounter she had with a fan in a bathroom who immediately began discussing her body type, and the frustration she experienced with how discussions of her appearance have overshadowed the work and dedication she has put into her craft.
“‘I remember this really drunk girl once talking to me in a bathroom being like, ‘I loved [Bridgerton] because of your body’,” she recounted. “And 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.’
She admitted she also found it concerning considering the size she was at the time of the third season’s production. “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. 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?”’
In fact, in 2024, trolls accused Coughlan of having her waist “photoshopped”, which she denied. “I think if you wear corsetry for long enough, your body really moulds to it,” she said about the costumes that she wears on the show’s sets. “Sometimes they come in a fitting for a fashion designer and they put a corset on me and I’m like, ‘Oh, you can go tight,’ and they go, ‘What do you mean?’ I’m like, ‘My body now will go whew.’”
Coughlan also said that she doesn’t consider herself a body positivity advocate. “The thing I say sometimes that pisses people off is I have no interest in body positivity. When I was a kid growing up, I never thought about that. I didn’t look at actors and think about their bodies. So, I actually don’t care. There’s a lot of things I’m passionate about, it’s not one of them… That’s someone else’s thing. It’s not mine.”
Coughlan has spoken out against online trolls in the past. Calling them out directly in a 2022 Instagram post, she wrote: “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.”
The second part of Bridgerton’s fourth season dropped on Netflix last week. Last year, it was confirmed that a fifth and sixth season had been commissioned.