Nicola Coughlan has criticized the focus on her body and the response to her nude scenes Bridgerton.
She said it was frustrating to see months of work being all about her looks rather than acting skills.
The 39-year-old actress said she had trained heavily prior to filming, but was still labeled ‘plus size’.
She narrated the April 2026 issue ELLE UK magazine: “When I was shooting that series I was working out a lot because I knew I had to, so I had lost a lot of weight – I was probably a size 10 and one of the corsets was a size 8. And then people were talking about how I was plus size and I was like, ‘How f****d are we that I’m the biggest woman you want to see on screen?'”
Coughlan recalled a particular encounter in a bathroom and emphasized how uncomfortable the judgment could be.
She recalled, “I remember this really drunk girl once talking to me in a bathroom and saying, ‘I loved [Bridgerton] because of your body.” And I started talking about my body, and I thought, ‘I want to die. I hate this so much…’ It’s really hard when you work on something for months, you don’t see your family, you really put in the effort and then it comes down to how you look – it’s so damn boring.”
She also resisted the idea of being presented as a body positivity figure, saying this was never something she wanted to embody.
Nicola said: “What I sometimes say that makes people angry is that I have no interest in body positivity.”
“Growing up as a kid, I never thought about that. I didn’t look at actors or think about their bodies. So I don’t really care. There are a lot of things that I’m passionate about, it’s not one of them… That’s someone else’s thing. It’s not mine,” she admitted.
Nicola then reflected on her career success and admitted that she once feared she would be typecast after her career success Derry girls.
“I’m very lucky with that,” she said.
“I think there was a risk to it Derry girls to be such a success, just out of the blue… It was incredible, but you do have a moment where you think, ‘Am I going to play this character forever?’ I was lucky Bridgerton came along, because it was immediately very different,” concluded Nicola Coughlan.
