Nicola Coughlan has never been one to shy away from a difficult conversation, especially when it comes to the public’s often intrusive fascination with women’s bodies.
While promoting Bridgerton season three, she was told she was “very brave” for appearing in nude scenes, a compliment that was notably not directed at her female co-stars. Without missing a beat, Coughlan responded by pointing out the double standard, saying, “You know, it is hard because I think women with my body type — women with perfect breasts — we do not see ourselves onscreen enough.” The remark quickly became emblematic of the way body conversations around female actors can be both reductive and oddly selective.
Yet even now, with Bridgerton season four behind her and a growing list of projects ahead, Coughlan finds herself repeatedly pulled back into discussions about her appearance rather than her work. Speaking to Elle as their April UK cover star, she admitted she has little interest in engaging with the broader body positivity discourse that often surrounds her.
“The thing I say sometimes that pisses people off is I have no interest in body positivity,” she said. “When I was a kid growing up, I never thought about that. I didn’t look at actors and think about their bodies.”
Danny Kruger is obsessed with our “unregulated sexual economy.”
“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.”
For Coughlan, the overwhelming focus on her physique during the promotion of the show sometimes overshadowed the significance of the storyline itself. The intimate scenes she filmed were widely discussed online, but much of that conversation centred not on the narrative or performance but on her body, a dynamic she has described as emotionally draining.
There is an exhausting expectation placed on women in the public eye to represent broader movements they never actively chose to lead. In Coughlan’s case, she found herself positioned as a symbol of body positivity simply by existing as an actress who doesn’t conform to narrow industry norms.
She also pushed back against the label “plus size,” revealing that she was around a UK size 8 to 10 while filming the intimate scenes for the series. “When I was shooting, 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 explained.
“And then people talked about how I was plus size and I was like, ‘How messed up are we that I am the biggest woman you want to see on screen?’”
Her comments highlight a broader cultural confusion about size labels within the fashion and entertainment industries, where categories often feel disconnected from real-world averages. For many viewers, it can be jarring that an actress considered “larger” by industry standards would be anywhere close to what most people would consider average.
More than the labels themselves, Coughlan has spoken about how invasive it can feel to have her body become a subject of public commentary. She recalled a moment when a very drunk fan approached her in a bathroom and said they loved Bridgerton “because of your body” before continuing to talk about her appearance in detail.
“I was like, ‘I want to die. I hate this so much,’” she said.
Ultimately, Coughlan has argued that the intense focus on appearance risks diminishing the immense work actors put into their craft. Filming a major romantic season of Bridgerton involved months of production, emotional investment, and time away from family — efforts she feels are too often reduced to superficial commentary.
“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 fucking boring,” she said.
While Penelope’s season of Bridgerton did mark a cultural moment as one of the franchise’s most visible romances centred on a curvier heroine, Coughlan has consistently framed the story as something far richer. Beyond the physical representation, the arc explored friends-to-lovers romance, female ambition, and the complexity of female friendship — themes that cannot be distilled into clothing sizes or body statistics.
Women who exist in different bodies should not feel pressured to act as spokespeople for those bodies, nor should they be reduced to their size alone. We don't have to always be positive or act like an inspiration, we don't have to always speak about our bodies. We're more than the missing gap between our thighs.
No, I'm not going to ‘change my mind’.
From Derry Girls to Big Mood, Coughlan has delivered exceptional performances that have nothing to do with the size of the clothes she wears, and everything to do with the talent she brings to every role.
And if there is one message Nicola Coughlan seems eager to leave behind, it’s that reducing art, performance, or identity to appearance alone is, quite simply, deeply uninteresting. Or, as she put it herself: it’s “so f***ing boring.”
