Nicola Coughlan Wanted to Be ‘Very Naked’ on Bridgerton
She said it felt like an “amazingly empowering” response to cruel comments about her body.
Bridgerton season three is all about Penelope Featherington — played by Nicola Coughlan — and her turn at love with Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton). In true Bridgerton fashion, there are plenty of sex scenes — which Coughlan says is exactly how she wanted it.
“I specifically asked for certain lines and moments to be included,” Coughlan said in an interview with Stylist, as reported by BuzzFeed. “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.”
Coughlan has dealt with cruel comments about her body throughout her career. In 2022, she wrote in a since-deleted Instagram post, “It’s really hard to take the weight of thousands of opinions on how you look being sent directly to you every day.” In the same post, she spoke directly to her critics, saying: “If you have an opinion about my body please, please don’t share it with me.” Back in 2018, she wrote an op-ed for The Guardian titled “Critics, Judge Me for My Work in Derry Girls and on the Stage, Not on My Body.”
In an interview with the L.A. Times published on Sunday, Coughlan described feeling nervous before filming her first sex scene. After costume designers sent her home with a thong that she would wear during filming, she said she “went to the bathroom and looked in the full-length mirror. I was like: ‘Absolutely not!’ I hid it down the bottom of the laundry basket. I was like: ‘How am I going to do this?’” But Coughlan said that ultimately she found filming the scenes with Newton surprisingly freeing. “By the end of the day, we were both lying under a blanket, not clothed, just chillin’. We were like, ‘This is why nudists do it,’” she said.
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