Nicola Coughlan is opening up about the body-shaming she faced when she was on Bridgerton.
The 39-year-old actress has starred as Penelope Featherington/Penelope Bridgerton since the start of the Netflix series.
In a new interview, Nicola addressed the body-shaming around her, especially in the first couple of seasons, as well as not having an interest in being a body-positivity advocate.
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“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,” she told Elle UK. “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.”
Nicola also talked about the body-shamers over her nude scenes on the show. There was even one scene she particularly asked to do!
“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 f-cked are we that I am the biggest woman you want to see on screen?’” she said.
“I remember this really drunk girl once talking to me in a bathroom being like, ‘I loved [Bridgerton] because of your body.’ And started talking about my body, and I was like, ‘I want to die. I hate this so much…’” Nicola recalled. “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 f-cking boring.”
Previously, Nicola revealed there was a family member that was not too thrilled about her Bridgerton intimate scenes…
