Nicola Coughlan has criticised the focus on her body and the reaction to her nude scenes in Bridgerton.
She expressed that it was frustrating to see months of work just be all about her appearance instead of acting skills.
The 39-year-old actress said she had trained heavily ahead of filming but still found herself labelled “plus size”.
She told the April 2026 issue of ELLE UK magazine: “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****d are we that I am the biggest woman you want to see on screen?’”
Coughlan recalled one particular encounter in a bathroom, highlighting how uncomfortable the judgement could be.
She recalled: “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…’ 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*****g boring.”
She also pushed back at the idea of being represented as a body-positivity figure, saying it was never something she wanted to embody.
Nicola said: “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,” she admitted.
Nicola then went on to reflect on her career success, admitting she once feared she might be typecast after the success of Derry Girls.
“I feel very lucky for that,” she said.
“I think there was a risk with Derry Girls being such a success, kind of out of nowhere… It was incredible, but you do have a moment where you go, ‘Am I going to play this character forever?’ I was lucky that Bridgerton came around, because it was really different right away,” Nicola Coughlan concluded.
