Nicola Coughlan is combating the body shamers with more nudity in Bridgerton Season 3.
The actress plays Penelope Featherington in Netflix‘s hit romance series, which has put her character and Luke Newton‘s Colin Bridgerton in the leading roles for its third installment as they make their way from friends to lovers.
Bridgerton is well-known for its steamy sex scenes — and while Coughlan had never filmed one before joining the show, she revealed that one scene in which she is “very naked” was all her doing.
“I specifically asked for certain lines and moments to be included. There’s one scene where I’m very naked on camera, and that was my idea, my choice,” she told Stylist magazine. “It just felt like the biggest ‘fuck you’ to all the conversation surrounding my body; it was amazingly empowering.”
She added, “I felt beautiful in the moment, and I thought: ‘When I’m 80, I want to look back on this and remember how fucking hot I looked!’”
However, the Derry Girls actress wasn’t always as confident when it came to filming racy scenes.
“I went to the bathroom and looked in the full-length mirror. I was like, ‘Absolutely not,’” Coughlan recalled of when she first tried on the strapless thong that would later serve as protection while filming, per the Los Angeles Times. “I hid it down the bottom of the laundry basket.”
Though, she added, “By the end of the day, we were both lying under a blanket, not clothed, just chillin’. We were like, ‘This is why nudists do it.’”
Plus, Coughlan recently told DECIDER that she was no longer “sweating” sex scenes in other projects like the comedy series Big Mood — and it was all thanks to Bridgerton.
“It helped massively because the sex scenes in Bridgerton, they take days to film. And you know, it’s so much about that,” she said. “And that’s the thing I really love about Bridgerton; It’s a show about female pleasure and women’s experiences.”
She added, “Doing a comedy sex scene, I was, like, not sweating. I was like, ‘This is fine!’”
While she ultimately found the experience to be liberating, the star still demanded a cut of Bridgerton excluding her risqué scenes for her parents to watch.
“It’s literally written into my contract. People think I’m saying it as a joke,” Coughlan said on SiriusXM Hits 1. “I just don’t want to … We grew up Irish Catholic. That’s just not how we vibe.”
Bridgerton Season 3, Part 1 is currently streaming on Netflix.
