TV & Movies
Why Bridgerton Star Nicola Coughlan Chose To Be “Very Naked” In Season 3
“That was my idea, my choice.”
Half of Bridgerton Season 3 hit Netflix on May 16, so Polin is wholly on fans’ minds. The first four episodes have yet to reveal whether or not Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) will find lasting love with her longtime crush, Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton), but my, oh, my, did they share some steamy moments.
Adding More Spice
It sounds like the heat will only rise in Part 2. Coughlan recently opened up to Stylist about a scene that should appear in the latter four episodes, based on the details she spilled and the sex scenes we’ve seen in Season 3 so far. She described it as one in which she’s “very naked” and explained why she wanted it that way.
“There’s one scene where I’m very naked on camera, and that was my idea, my choice,” Coughlan told the magazine, per People. “It just felt like the biggest ‘f--- you’ to all the conversation surrounding my body; it was amazingly empowering.”
Coughlan also had the foresight to think about what her future self would want. “I felt beautiful in the moment, and I thought: ‘When I’m 80, I want to look back on this and remember how f---ing hot I looked!’” she added.
Feeling Empowered
Coughlan previously spoke about how “liberating” it was to shoot her sex scenes for Bridgerton when she appeared on the British talk show This Morning in March. “Luke and I actually had a lot of say in what we wanted to do and we kind of had ideas about how we wanted things to play out,” she said, “which was great, ’cause we really felt like we were in control.”
The two worked with the “amazing” intimacy coordinator Lizzy Talbot, she added, and they enjoyed the process. Noting that they’d already been friends for four years, she recalled it going from “nerve-wracking” to “quite liberating and quite fun to do.”
Newton had a similar take when he spoke to Bustle in April. “We felt really safe, and we’ve got an amazing team of intimacy coordinators,” he said. “It was so well-prepared that it just freed us up to be able to perform.”
Not For Everyone
As proud as Coughlan may be of her work on Bridgerton, she doesn’t want her parents to see all of it. She’s said on multiple occasions that she had a “PG version” of Season 3 made for her mother.
“It’s literally written into my contract,” she told hosts of SiriusXM Hits 1 in April, per Variety. “People think I’m saying it as a joke. … We grew up Irish Catholic. That’s just not how we vibe.”
For the rest of us, Part 2 of Bridgerton Season 3 drops on June 13.
