Nicola Coughlan is totally over her body being the focus of so much attention.
The Bridgerton star pushed back at the public’s fixation on her figure in a new interview with Time magazine where she scoffed at being called “brave” for going nude in the Regency-era romance series.
“Don’t call me brave. I have a cracking pair of boobs,” she said. “There’s nothing brave about that, that’s actually just me showing them off.”
“I’m a few sizes below the average size of a woman in the U.K. and I’m seen as a ‘plus-size heroine,’” said Coughlan, who plays the feisty Penelope Featherington on the show.
The Irish actor called the body talk all the more frustrating given how much she put into her performance.
“I worked my arse off for that show. I barely saw my family and friends, and people were just going, ‘But your body,’” she explained.
Though the actor understands that people mean the comments as a compliment, she said she doesn’t find them “nice” at all.
“Making it about how I look is reductive and boring,” Coughlan explained. “What if I was suddenly going to play a ballerina and lose a shit ton of weight, are you not going to like me anymore? That’s insane and so insulting.”
While speaking with Stylist for its May cover story, the Derry Girls star shared that she drove the decision to bare her body during her sex scenes with costar Luke Newton, who plays her love interest Colin Bridgerton on the show.
“There’s one scene where I’m very naked on camera, and that was my idea, my choice,” she revealed. “It just felt like the biggest ‘fuck you’ to all the conversation surrounding my body; it was amazingly empowering.”
“I felt beautiful in the moment, and I thought: ‘When I’m 80, I want to look back on this and remember how fucking hot I looked!’”
