The Transformation Of Bridgerton's Nicola Coughlan Is Stunning

Few actors have achieved so much in a relatively brief period of time as Nicola Coughlan. Born and raised in Oranmore, a small town in Ireland's Galway County, this talented actor has made her mark on both stage and screen, initially in her native Ireland before coming to stardom internationally.

When examining the untold truth of Nicola Coughlan, it's clear that an outsized part of that success has come from her role in "Bridgerton," the sexy Netflix mega-hit from iconic TV producer Shonda Rhimes. She played Penelope Featherington, which was initially a supporting role in the first two seasons until it morphed into a starring one in the third, focusing entirely on her character's search for a suitable husband in the steamy historical drama. As viewers discovered, Penelope's storyline became far juicier at that season's end, when it was revealed that she was secretly the gossip-mongering author of Lady Whistledown's Society Papers.

Of course, "Bridgerton" is only one of many projects to have showcased her talent in recent years. It's clear that this actor is on a roll, and even greater success lies ahead. Her journey has been a fascinating one, and anyone who's been paying attention will recognize that the transformation of "Bridgerton's" Nicola Coughlan is stunning.

Nicola Coughlan grew up in a large, boisterous Irish family. "I'm the youngest in our family which was full of big personalities so you had to do something to stand out. That was perhaps the seed of my love of acting," she recalled in an interview with the Galway Advertiser. One of her most vivid early memories took place when she was just 6 years old, when she watched her older sister perform in a school play. Dazzled and mesmerized by what she witnessed, the youngster knew instantly that the stage was where she wanted to be. "From then on I was determined that acting was something I wanted to do," she said. 

She was serious and continued to pursue her goal. In fact, she was just 9 when she landed her first professional role, cast as "Little Girl Feeding Swans" in the film "My Brother's War." The experience was memorable and included missing a day of school while earning about $50 — and her first screen credit.

Nicola went on to study the craft at the Oxford School of Drama and Birmingham School of Acting, a time in her life that remains seminal for her. "When I got to Oxford it was like I had found my childhood dream, some of the people I met there are my best friends still," she said. "It was an amazing experience getting to do what I had always wanted to do, it was brilliant."

Even as a child, Nicola Coughlan had a gift for mimicry, imitating people she'd encounter or practicing different accents. That worked in her favor when she was just 14 and began booking work as a voice actor in animated film and TV projects. The first of these was a Danish cartoon based on the stories of Hans Christian Anderson originally titled "The Fairytaler," with Coughlan among the actors dubbing the series in English.

Coughlan blossomed as a voice actor, and became a familiar face at casting sessions after perfecting a posh British accent to cover her Irish brogue. "I used to do a lot of voiceovers," she recalled while appearing on "The Late Show with Seth Meyers." "If there was a tiny frog or a little princess, I was like, 'I will do that voice!'" During that period, her voice appeared in several other animated series, including the 2011 animated feature "Thor: Legend of the Magical Hammer."

Years later, her experience in the recording booth continued to shape her approach to a role, with a character's voice being an entry into crafting her performance. "I often find the voice first," she told Vogue Australia. "Once I find the voice, then the rest of it sort of falls into place ."

Envisioning a future as a working actor, Nicola Coughlan realized she needed to be where the jobs were, and moved from Galway to London. This was a period that was both exciting and discouraging for the young actor, and it's fair to say she wasn't exactly an overnight success. "With acting it can be so difficult to get a break and I came close to giving up," she admitted to the Galway Advertiser. 

She experienced the often-difficult life of a struggling actor, and it was certainly no walk in the park. "I hadn't had an audition in about a year," she told the Express when recalling a particularly low point, revealing that her inability to launch herself as an actor had left her in a deep depression. "I had no money in my bank account, so I had to move back in with my parents," she recalled. "It was horrendous. I was in a really bad place," she told The Guardian.

Over the course of a four-year period, Coughlan moved to London three separate times, each time becoming frustrated and discouraged when the big break she was seeking never materialized and she was forced to return home. "I just felt like the worst failure in the world, like I'd wasted time," she told The Guardian. "I was pitying myself: 'Why did you think you could do this?'"

Back at home in Ireland, Coughlan heard about an open audition at London's Old Vic theater, seeking young actors for a festival being produced by the venerable London establishment. Willing to give it one more shot, Coughlan threw caution to the wind, knowing she might not have this opportunity again. "I flew to London for the auditions and they saw about 1,500 young actors and they picked seven of us, and I was lucky enough to be one of the seven," she told the Galway Advertiser. 

Her lucky streak continued when she wound up landing a leading role in a small play. "I was cast in an amazing two-hander play called 'Jess and Joe Forever' by Zoe Cooper," she said. The play became an instant success, with Coughlan's talent exploding onstage. "We performed it at the Old Vic and then it got picked up and had a run at the Orange Tree theater in west London and I got nominated for an Off West End award for Best Female performance and it got nominated for Best New Play," she recalled. 

Suddenly, the struggling young actor who couldn't even get an audition had become the toast of the London theater scene. It would be back in her native Ireland, however, where the next important chapter of her story would be written.

Because of her diminutive height – she stands just 5 foot 1 — Nicola Coughlan has often been cast as characters younger than herself. Such was the case when the 30-year-old landed a role as a high school girl in a new Irish comedy called "Derry Girls" for the U.K.'s Channel 4 network. As she told the Galway Independent, "I feel incredibly lucky to be part of a Channel 4 show that has four strong, comedic female leads."

The show, about a group of teenage girls in the Irish city of Derry during the 1990s in the midst of the fraught period known as the Troubles, quickly became a sensation. Not only was "Derry Girls" 2022's most-watched show of the year in Northern Ireland, but it also hit in the rest of the U.K., becoming Channel 4's most-watched series since the beloved sitcom "Father Ted." 

And that was just the beginning. Once "Derry Girls" was picked up by Netflix, the show garnered an international audience as viewers throughout the world watched more than 17 million hours of it. This was a level of success she'd yet to experience, and Coughlan took pride in having achieved it on her own. "I'm happy to say that I had no 'in' in this industry," she told Refinery29. "I come from a small village in the west of Ireland. I had no connections ... It took me until I was 30 to get a good job on television."

Nicola Coughlan returned to the stage in 2018, making her West End debut in a production of "The Prime of Miss Jean Brody," a stage production of the film starring "Harry Potter" and "Downton Abbey" icon Maggie Smith, who died in 2024. It was one review (which has since been scrubbed from the internet) that raised her ire when theater critic Philip Fisher described her character as an "overweight little girl." 

Coughlan fired back by calling out Fisher in a scathing and insightful essay she wrote for The Guardian. "Everything I'd done to create my character had been reduced to a hurtful word and casual comment on my appearance," she wrote. She also reminded readers that same critic had referred to her as a "fat girl" when reviewing "Jess and Joe Forever," a slight she didn't address at the time but felt equally offended by. "That was hurtful, and not only in the obvious way," she wrote. "Those were the only words he could think of to describe the work I'd done."

As Coughlan continued, she insisted that she wasn't all that thin-skinned — if she truly wanted to experience body-shaming to the extreme, she could simply read the comments to a "Derry Girls" video on YouTube ("it truly is the armpit of the internet," she wrote). However, she'd felt compelled to respond because this wasn't just some anonymous internet troll but a supposedly legitimate theater critic. "Fisher is a professional; he was meant to review my work," Coughlan wrote. "Instead he reviewed my body. That is not acceptable."

By 2020, "Derry Girls" was the biggest thing that Nicola Coughlan had been in. That changed when she was cast as Penelope Featherington in "Bridgerton," the Netflix historical drama produced by Shonda Rhimes, whose string of television hits included "Grey's Anatomy," "Scandal," and "How to Get Away with Murder." When the show premiered in December 2020, it proved to be an instant smash, breaking viewership records for Netflix. 

While it's true that some actors' careers have been ruined by Shonda Rhimes' shows, the opposite occurred for Coughlan when Penelope became a standout on the series. Coughlan even made the list of The Hollywood Reporter's 16 rising young stars of 2021, as "Bridgerton" catapulted her to a whole new level of fame. "With 'Derry Girls,' people really enjoy the show, and say, 'I love that,'" she told The Guardian. "With 'Bridgerton,' it's a different beast."

That it was, a phenomenon she ruminated upon when interviewed for Elle UK. "Being famous is like being a dog on the Tube. It's exactly the same energy," said Coughlan, referring to London's subway. "When you get on, everyone looks at you. Some people are so smiley, while some are afraid of you and don't want to go near. Some people touch you without asking." 

In 2021, Nicola Coughlan added another entry to her résumé when she ventured into a different area of showbiz, serving as both star and writer of a new comedy podcast, "Whistle Through the Shamrocks." Marking her writing debut, the project came about when she and screenwriter pal Camilla Whitehill-Mathieson decided to collaborate. "Camilla and I had this running joke for 12 years with each other about the most Irish monologues we could imagine and during lockdown we finally decided to write it as a show, and see if anyone was brave enough to make it," she said while promoting "Whistle Through the Shamrocks" at London's Podcast Festival (via Stylist). 

Coughlan and Whitehill assembled an impressive cast for their podcast, including "Derry Girls" co-stars Paul Mallon and Louisa Harland, comedian Ed Gamble, Catherine Cohen of "Broad City," "Queer Eye" fan favorite Jonathan Van Ness, and "Brooklyn Nine Nine" alum Stephanie Beatriz. "I've basically roped in people I've worked with on other shows by threatening them with releasing scandalous stories about them online — so we have an amazing cast," she joked.

That wasn't the only audio-only project that the former voice actor has taken on. Fans of Coughlan who enjoy listening to audiobooks are in for a treat, because she's recorded a lot of them. In fact, her dulcet tones can be heard on audiobook versions of such classics as Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" and Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist," in addition to "Aren't We Lucky," "The Shadow Cabinet," "Queen B," "Misdirected," and others. "I love audiobooks, and I love acting in them because there is such a level of freedom to them," she told Vogue Australia.

In 2024, Nicola Coughlan once again collaborated with writer Camilla Whitehill, her friend since attending drama school at Oxford together. This time, the project was "Big Mood," a TV dramedy series about best friends Maggie (Coughlan) and Eddie (Lydia West), living in gritty East London. Maggie is a playwright with bipolar disorder whose life careens out of control when she decides to stop taking her medication in order to clear her head so she can write the play that her agent has been waiting far too long for. 

Whitehill's first TV series proved to be a major hit for the U.K.'s Channel 4, becoming the network's most-watched new comedy series since "Derry Girls." That success, however, was never guaranteed. As Coughlan told Radio Times, "Big Mood" and its taboo-breaking theme of living with mental illness was initially a tough sell, but she insisted on attaching herself to the show even before it was picked up by Channel 4 — much to the dismay of her agent. "And she was like, 'Ok... there are other things people want you for,'" Coughlan recalled, admitting that "it's very hard to sell that to an agent." 

According to Coughlan, the role pushed her as an actor like no other she'd ever played. "And it was also the most challenging part I've ever played as well because it goes through the journey of her mental illness, and that's complicated to depict on screen," she explained. Given the massive ratings, the show was renewed for a second season, with Coughlan and West returning with more "Big Mood" in 2026.

When Bridgerton returned for its third season in spring 2024, the focus shifted to Nicola Coughlan's Penelope Featherington. In the wake of her exposure as Lady Whistledown, the season chronicled her romance with Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton), culminating with their wedding. 

It's true that the intimate scenes in "Bridgerton" Season 2 redefined taboo topics, and that continued in the third season. "Bridgerton" being "Bridgerton," the role required Coughlan to participate in some pretty explicit love scenes, one of which goes on for more than six minutes — a "Bridgerton" record for longest sex scene – that exposed parts of Coughlan's anatomy never before seen onscreen. During a audience Q&A after a Dublin screening, a member of the audience addressed the truth about the intimate scenes in Bridgerton, commending Coughlan for being "very brave" to bare all for the camera. 

Coughlan issued a response for the ages. "You know, it is hard 'cause I think women with my body type — women with perfect breasts — we do not see ourselves onscreen enough," she declared, met by cheers and laughter from the audience. "I am very proud as a member of the perfect-breasts community. I hope you enjoy seeing them."

At the end of 2024, Nicola Coughlan joined the pantheon of actors to appear in one of Britain's most beloved TV shows when she joined the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) aboard the time- and space-traveling TARDIS for the annual "Doctor Who" Christmas special. Titled "Joy to the World," Coughlan portrayed the titular Joy, who embarks on a time-spanning adventure that includes encountering a Tyrannosaurus rex, traveling on the Orient Express in the early 1960s, and climbing Mount Everest circa 1953.

Coughlan certainly knew of "Doctor Who," but had never actually watched it. To prepare, she checked out past Christmas specials and did some research about the show's considerable lore. The more she learned, the more excited she grew about the opportunity. "I was like, 'It's cool that I get to be a part of this world!'" she told Nerdist.

The knowledge she gained about the show, however, also led her to the realization of just how big a deal it was to be part of a franchise that has been part of the cultural fabric of Britain for more than 60 years. Admitting she was "terrified by the mammoth entity that 'Doctor Who' is," Coughlan was ultimately glad that she'd participated. "But it was just such a great experience!" she gushed.