Nicola Coughlan hits back at trolls who say her waist was “photoshopped” on ‘Bridgerton’

Nicola Coughlan has hit back at trolls who said that her waist was “photoshopped” during the third season of Bridgerton.

• READ MORE: ‘Bridgerton’ season three review: still sweet and seductive but the taste is growing stale

The actor plays Penelope Featherington on the Netflix period romantic drama, and in a new interview with People, she has responded to certain social media speculation about her appearance on the show.

“I think if you wear corsetry for long enough, your body really moulds to it,” she said about the costumes that she wears on the show’s sets. “Sometimes they come in a fitting for a fashion designer and they put a corset on me and I’m like, ‘Oh, you can go tight,’ and they go, ‘What do you mean?’ I’m like, ‘My body now will go whew.’”

“I saw some trolls,” she continued. “They were like, ‘They photoshopped your waist,’ and I was like, ‘No, they did not.’”

Last month, Coughlan went further when she said a nude sex scene in the new season was a “fuck you” to the online trolls who body shame her.

Coughlan, who collaborated closely with Bridgerton intimacy coordinator Lizzy Talbot on her sex scenes, said: “You go, ‘Ok, what do I want to show? What don’t I want to show? What’s scripted, and what do I want to add?’

“I specifically asked for certain lines and moments to be included,” Coughlan continued. “There’s one scene where I’m very naked on camera, and that was my idea, my choice. It just felt like the biggest ‘fuck you’ to all the conversation surrounding my body; it was amazingly empowering. 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!’”

Coughlan has spoken out against online trolls in the past. Calling them out directly in a 2022 Instagram post, she wrote: “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.”

She later told the Irish Times: “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.”

Coughlan and Newton step into the lead roles for season three as the new episodes focus on their character’s progression from friends to romantic partners, and the final four episodes of the season were released onto the streaming platform this week.

In a three-star review of season three, NME wrote: “If you don’t have much of a sweet tooth, this still won’t be the show for you. But if you’re craving an early-summer pick-me-up, you’ll devour these warm and watchable episodes in one scrummy sitting.”

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