Nicola Coughlan Claps Back About The Constant Focus On Her Body Size

Whomst among us isn’t at least a little bit in love with Nicola Coughlan? Whether you’re a Derry Girls fan, a Bridgerton fan, both, or just happen to catch her razor sharp retorts to insulting questions, it would be easy to say the Irish actress exploded to stardom in the past five or so years. But in a recent interview with Time, Coughlan, 37, talks about a career arduously built since she was 19 years old… and how all that work can be overlooked by even the most well-meaning fans and journalists who’d rather focus on her body.

Coughlan doesn’t look like most ingenues: she’s 5’1” and, as she told Time, “a few sizes below the average size of a woman in the U.K.” And yet, she notes, she’s routinely referred to as a “plus-size heroine.” Even when it’s complimentary, and she recognizes that it often can be, she doesn’t take it that way. “I don’t take it as nice. Making it about how I look is reductive and boring,” she told the outlet. “What if I was suddenly going to play a ballerina and lose a sh-t ton of weight, are you not going to like me anymore? That’s insane and so insulting.”

Above and beyond all that, she feels the focus on her body takes away from her actual work. “I worked my arse off for [Bridgerton],” she said. “I barely saw my family and friends, and people were just going, ‘But your body …’”

This isn’t the first time Coughlan has lamented people’s fixation with her body in the press. She told the Irish Times earlier this year, “If you have an opinion about my body please, please don’t share it with me. It’s really hard to take the weight of thousands of opinions on how you look being sent directly to you every day. … People love to undermine women and their hard work. I don’t think anything has improved unfortunately, but the only thing I can try and do is just go out there and do the best I can do with every job I’m given. And to hopefully get as many different roles as I can. All I care about is the work. Bodies change, if I lose weight or gain weight or I do anything it’s no one’s business, all I care about is doing good acting and being judged on that.”

It can be hard for the self-declared “people pleaser” to navigate boundaries. Not just unwanted comments about her body but also maintaining privacy from fans who, she says, can be invasive (like when she discovered her night off was being filmed).

“I oscillate between two things as a woman,” she explained to Time. “It costs nothing to be nice and women don’t owe you niceness. Both of those things are true.”

While fans will have to wait more than a year for the next installment of Bridgerton and, Coughlan confirms, she has no plans to return to Derry Girls, (“To me it was three [seasons] and it was perfect,” she told Time) fans can look forward to seeing her in the Doctor Who Christmas Special later this year.