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Bridgerton [3] star Nicola Coughlan [4] shared this recent Instagram post with a very important message regarding comments about her body: keep them to yourself. She said in the caption, "If you have an opinion about my body please, please don't share it with me."
The 35-year-old Irish actress best known for her role as Bridgerton's town gossip, Penelope Featherington, said that while most people are not intentionally trying to be offensive, she's a real human being and "it's really hard to take the weight of thousands of opinions on how you look being sent directly to you every day." Of course she knows with being an actress on TV, people are entitled to their personal opinions, but she politely says, "I beg you not to send it to me directly."
This isn't the first time Coughlan has spoken out about people commenting on how she looks. A while back in 2018, Coughlan wrote a poignant op-ed for The Guardian [6], where she demanded for critics to "judge me for my work in Derry Girls and on the stage, not on my body." Coughlan has also tweeted in the past about how journalists should stop asking women about their bodies and their weight in interviews, because it has nothing to do with their work.
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 — Nicola Coughlan (@nicolacoughlan) March 1, 2021 [7]
Coughlin also tweeted, "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," She added, "My body is the tool I use to tell stories, not what I define myself by."