Nicola Coughlan Asked Fans To Stop Sending Opinions On Her Body Via IG

With Bridgerton and Derry Girls both set to make their triumphant returns this year, Nicola Coughlan is preparing for a very busy year. “I never want to sell people this ideal that it’s all wonderful and fun,” the actor recently told Elle. “It’s hard work. But it’s amazing. I wouldn’t do anything else.” While the love of her craft is blindingly obvious, the actor has once again had to remind the internet not to share opinions of her body.

“Most people are being nice and trying not to be offensive but I am just one human being,” she wrote on Instagram on Jan. 30. “It’s really hard to take the weight of thousands of opinions on how you look being sent directly to you every day.

“If you have an opinion about me that’s ok, I understand I’m on TV and that people will have things to think and say but I beg you not to send it to me directly.”

This isn’t the first time Coughlan has spoken about the comments she’s received about her body. In March, she called for interviewers to stop asking women about their weight in interviews. “Every time I’m asked about my body in an interview it makes me deeply uncomfortable and so sad I’m not just allowed to just talk about the job I do that I so love,” she wrote in a Twitter thread.

“It’s so reductive to women when we’re making great strides for diversity in the arts, but questions like that just pull us backwards.”

The Derry Girls star went on to say that while she may be vocal on these matters, she doesn’t class herself as a “body positivity activist” — rather an actor who would “lose or gain weight if an important role” required it. “My body is the tool I use to tell stories, not what I define myself by,” she concluded.

In the thread, Coughlan referred to an op-ed she wrote for The Guardian in 2018 where the actor asked critics to judge her for her work and not her body. “Something in society tells us that women’s bodies are fair game for scrutiny in a way that men’s simply are not,” Coughlan wrote. “I hope in the future that more people will talk about our work, our inspirations, our drive rather than our looks. A revolution is happening, and I want to play my part in it.”