Nicola Coughlan Is Over Having to Talk About Her Body

Nicola Coughlan is really sick of having to address commentary about her body. In an interview with Elle U.K. published on Friday, Coughlan said she’s not interested in being the poster child for the body-positivity movement because she finds the conversation around her appearance “so fucking boring.”

“The thing I say sometimes that pisses people off is I have no interest in body positivity,” Coughlan told Elle U.K. “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.” Coughlan said there are many things she is “passionate about,” but body positivity is “not one of them.” “That’s someone else’s thing. It’s not mine,” she said.

Coughlan — who in the Netflix series Bridgerton plays Penelope Featherington, whose romance with Colin Bridgerton was the focus of the show’s third season — reflected on the way her nude scenes during that season became such a dominant topic of conversation. “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,” she said. “And then people talked about how I was plus size and I was like, ‘How fucked are we that I am the biggest woman you want to see on screen?’”

Coughlan also recalled “this really drunk girl once talking to me in a bathroom being like, ‘I loved [Bridgerton] because of your body.’” She said the fan “started talking about my body, and I was like, ‘I want to die. I hate this so much,’” Coughlan 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.”

This isn’t the first time Coughlan has had to tell people to quit being weird about her appearance. In an Instagram post in 2022, she said it was “hard to take the weight of thousands of opinions on how you look.” “If you have an opinion about my body please, please don’t share it with me,” she said. In 2024, shortly after the premiere of her starring season of Bridgerton, she offered a cheeky response to a reporter who called her nude scenes “very brave.” “You know, it is hard because I think women with my body type — women with perfect breasts — we don’t get to see ourselves onscreen enough,” she said. “And I’m very proud as a member of the perfect-breasts community. I hope you enjoy seeing them.”