What to Know
After Penelope Featherington’s love story was told on season 3 of Bridgerton, the actress who portrays her on the Netflix series, Nicola Coughlan, was thrust into the spotlight — including a few nude scenes. But after the episodes premiered, she found herself the subject of body shaming, and unfortunately, it’s still something she’s dealing with, thanks to what people say on social media (and even in person).
Before shooting season 3 of Bridgerton, Nicola lost weight.
In a new interview with Elle, Nicola said she had just lost weight, knowing that she’d be shooting a lot of revealing scenes for the season, and that fact happened to blow right past people.
“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 explained. “And then people talked about how I was plus size and I was like, ‘How f—– are we that I am the biggest woman you want to see on screen?'”
She believes it’s “boring” to focus so much on someone’s body.
It’s not just comments online that Nicola’s been subjected to — she told Elle that a fan once approached her in person to discuss her weight.
“I remember this really drunk girl once talking to me in a bathroom being like, ‘I loved [Bridgerton] because of your body.’ And started talking about my body, and I was like, ‘I want to die. I hate this so much,'” she said. “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 f—— boring.”
There are a lot of other things that fans could have talked about when it came to Penelope and Colin’s love story on the show, so truly, why did Nicola’s body have anything to do with it?
Nicola has spoken out about body shaming in the past.
her pout at the beginning 😭 pic.twitter.com/dinBsi5acR
— bel (@ccutiny) June 6, 2024
When these types of comments really ramped up after Bridgerton season 3 was released in 2024, Nicola didn’t let it go when one fan who came to see her at an event in Dublin mentioned that she was “very brave” to show off her body.
“You know, it is hard, ‘cause I think women with my body type — women with perfect breasts — we do not get to see ourselves onscreen enough,” she said at the time. “I am a very proud member of the perfect breasts community, and I hope you enjoy seeing them.”
She couldn’t have had a better response prepared. And honestly, can we get to talking about what actually matters, like Hyacinth dancing to Charli XCX in season 4?
