Nicola Coughlan Pushes Back at Being Called a ‘Plus-Size Heroine

In a new interview with Time magazine, the Bridgerton star pushed back at the public’s fixation over her figure and pushed back at being called “brave” for stripping down in the Regency-era romance series.

“Don’t call me brave. I have a cracking pair of boobs,” Coughlan said. “There’s nothing brave about that, that’s actually just me showing them off.”

She continued, “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.'”

Coughlan, who plays Penelope Featherington on the show, said all the discourse surrounding her body was all the more frustrating given everything 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,'” the Derry Girls actress went on to say.

Though she said she understands that people mean the comments as a compliment, she said she doesn’t find them “nice” in the slightest.

“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 s–t ton of weight, are you not going to like me anymore? That’s insane and so insulting.”

Coughlan touched on the topic previously in a May interview with Stylist, where she shared that she drove the decision to go nearly-nude 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 ‘f–k 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 f–king hot I looked!'”