Nicola Coughlan has revealed she has a stipulation in her contract that Bridgerton provides a PG cut for her parents.
The 37-year-old actor, who plays Penelope Featherington in the Netflix period drama, was born in Galway, Ireland, into an Irish Catholic family.
Coughlan, also known for starring in Derry Girls, made the revelation while appearing on SiriusXM Hits 1 on Thursday (4 April).
“It’s literally written into my contract,” she said. “People think I’m like saying it as a joke. I just don’t want to. I grew up Irish Catholic. That’s just not how we vibe.”
The actor also recalled her mother’s reaction to the abundance of nudity in season one. “When she first saw Bridgerton, she didn’t know it was gonna be so saucy,” Coughlan recalled.
“And then you get a bottom, Jonathan Bailey’s lovely bottom, about two minutes into the first episode ever. And she was like, ‘What is this?’ But then, now she thinks it’s fantastic and really funny, and she keeps talking about bottoms.”
Coughlan currently stars in Big Mood, a Channel 4 comedy about two best friends struggling to navigate the transition to adulthood.
“There’s a saucy scene in Big Mood, not Bridgerton level, but it’s in there,” she said on the radio show. “And I had avoided showing her that. And I did a talk show in Ireland in which she was in the audience, and they showed it on that. And I was like, ‘Okay, well I can’t control that anymore.’”
Teasing her Bridgerton character’s romance with Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton) in the forthcoming third season, she added: “We did break a piece of furniture while doing one of those scenes.
“I didn’t know what it was gonna be like, but it’s a little bit like a stunt in which they’re like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna do this, this, and this. But then they gave us freedom to like, we had a lot of say in how we did those scenes and what we wanted to do. And that makes you feel quite empowered and you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re gonna do this, this, and this.’ So we felt super. They were actually really enjoyable. I didn’t think they would be. They were great. It was fun.”
Independent
Written by Tom Murray
Published April 5, 2024