March 6, 2026, 9:40 a.m. ET
Nicola Coughlan doesn’t need your body positivity.
The “Bridgerton” star, 39, who was at the center of a conversation about body representation during the release of the show’s third season, said in a recent interview that the buzz around her figure was both surprising and uninteresting to her.
“The thing I say sometimes that pisses people off is, ‘I have no interest in body positivity,'” Coughlan told Elle in an article published March 4. “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.”
“There’s a lot of things I’m passionate about, it’s not one of them,” Coughlan, who plays Penelope Featherington in the Shonda Rhimes show, continued. “That’s someone else’s thing. It’s not mine.”
Penelope’s love story with Collin Bridgerton (Luke Newton) was the grounding romance in Season 3, and has continued to appear in the fourth season which wrapped in February. Known for its steamy scenes and swoon-worthy appeal, Coughlan told Elle that in some of the intimate moments caught on camera for “Bridgerton”, she was more petite after having lost some weight.
“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.”
The “Derry Girls” actress went on to recall an awkward run-in with a drunk woman in a bathroom who praised the show because of her body. “I was like, ‘I want to die. I hate this so much,'” Coughlan quipped.
“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,” she explained. “It’s so … boring.”
