Nicola Coughlan Admits She "Slid Into" Simone Ashley's DMs Ahead of "Bridgerton"

"Bridgerton" stars Nicola Coughlan and Simone Ashley recently joined BBC Radio 1's Greg James on the breakfast show to chat about the new series of Netflix's most talked-about period romance — and how fans reacted to Ashley joining the cast.

"It was all so fast; it happened in like 14 days, before I knew it. I remember I bumped into [Nicola] when I was going in for wig tests and makeup tests. That was like preproduction," Ashley tells Greg James.

Coughlan adds that "I completely slid into your DM's the moment I found out you were cast — I was like, 'hello!' We were very excited for new people to come in, and because it's a book series, we knew that it was Kate and Edwina coming in. Fans of the books are obsessed with Kate. Like obsessed. And since season one, they've been like 'who is Kate?', and they think I knew, but I didn't know. So I started getting all these messages, and they were like 'is it Simone Ashley?' and I was like 'is it? I don't know!'"

In regards to coming to terms with the success of "Bridgerton", it appears that it still hasn't completely sunk in for many members of the cast. "It's still quite hard to fathom because it came out in December 2020, when the world was still locked down, we weren't going anywhere, so it was just numbers on a screen and I was like 'that sounds like a lot of people'. But I grew up in Ireland, that's 5 million people, and this is 82 million people," Coughlan says.

Clearly, the pandemic had an impact, too, with the cast being in a bit of a bubble during filming. "It was super COVID safe, the set, so we had no lives really, while we were filming. So it's only now we're going out in the world. I was in Texas, and there were these teenage girls, and they were like *gasp* and pointing at me, and I was like 'well that's quite strange, I guess people did watch it'", Coughlan adds.

The pair then discussed Coughlan's recent behind-the-scenes video, where she spilled more than a few tasty secrets about the set of "Bridgerton" series two. "The cakes are styrofoam; we did have some biscuits and stuff. We also had amazing props artists called Jen and Neil, and they always had nice M&S biscuits", she reveals.