Nicola Coughlan Says She’d Like People To Focus On Her Acting Rather Than Her Image

"I don’t want people to think that they own that part of me..."

 

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Nicola Coughlan is The Observer Magazine’s latest cover star. Displaying a pair of colourful gloves as the fashion feature, the Derry Girls and Bridgerton star looks stunning in a close up shot that made the front page of the mag.

In the article Nicola discusses all from her job in an opticians just five years ago, to taking her own pictures at Elton John’s Oscars party when the paps weren’t interested, to now, being named one of Vogue’s best dressed women and hailing two globally loved shows, one of them being a Netflix number one.

 

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With success, comes the downside of fame, people thinking they have a right to say anything they like about you and your life.

Nicola recently brought this topic to light in an Instagram post where she asked followers to keep their opinions of her weight to themselves.

Speaking of that post in the interview, she told The Observer Magazine, “It’s just the language that’s used around women’s bodies – words have meaning. If you’re saying specific things about how someone looks, you can say, ‘This is just a word’ – sure, but it’s not to me.”

The actress also shared how she felt about the coverage the post got in the media, “[Headlines included comments] like, ‘She slams critics! She drops the mic! Thank you for speaking out!’ – but no, that was literally, selfishly about me as a human… It was misconstrued by a lot of people as me ‘taking down the haters’. Nope: this is me trying to tell you directly how I feel. I don’t mean it in a mean way; I’m just saying I would prefer this way going forward.”

 

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Nicola says she would rather the focus be on her talent and not her physical appearance, “I don’t want people to think that they own that part of me. If I want to turn around and become a hench-ass bodybuilder, if I want to shave my head or cover myself in tattoos, I’m going to do that… If I had a role to play, like, an Olympic gymnast, I will alter my body for that part, if that’s the part I want to play.”

Nicola’s talent is too great to be overlooked, with season two of Bridgerton coming in March we cannot wait to see what her character Penelope Featherington (aka Lady Whistledown) gets up to this season.