Nicola Coughlan says filming ‘Bridgerton’ was glamorous on screen and brutally exhausting behind the scenes.
The Irish actress, who plays Penelope Featherington on the Netflix hit, opened up during an appearance on the U.K. podcast ‘Dish from Waitrose.’ She spoke about food, her career and the emotional toll of juggling ‘Bridgerton’ with another major project, ‘Big Mood.’
Coughlan, 39, said ‘Bridgerton’ is “always a lovely job to come back to,” but the schedule can be intense. A season of the show usually takes around eight months to shoot, and things became especially draining when production overlapped with ‘Big Mood.’
“We did ‘Bridgerton,’ it was an eight-month shoot generally, a ‘Bridgerton’ season,” she said. “So, it was at the end of it we started to overlap.”
Coughlan Says The Schedule Left Her Exhausted
Coughlan explained that she would sometimes move straight from one show to the other. “I did, let’s say, a full week on ‘Bridgerton,’ then a full week on ‘Big Mood,’ then the weekend ‘Bridgerton,’” she said. Then she joked, “So, I just felt, I didn’t know my back from my elbow!”
Still, Coughlan said she kept reminding herself that this was exactly the kind of career she wanted. “But I also, deep down, I was like, ‘This is what you want to be doing though. You are so lucky. You’ll be tired for right now,’” she said.
She Says Crying Was A Release
Coughlan said people often react with concern when she tells them she cried frequently during that period. She sees it differently.
“It’s funny because I say to people, ‘Oh, I cried a lot,’ and people go, ‘Oh my God,’” she said. “I go, ‘No, look, crying’s not bad.’”
She described crying as a physical release when the body has hit its limit.
“Crying’s just a release of what’s inside you, and it’s your body going, ‘I’m really tired and I want to stop,’ but you’re going, ‘No, just come on, just push through, push through,’” she said.
Coughlan also noted that she had never led one show before, much less two at the same time. “And yeah, it was all worth it,” she said. “I’m delighted.”
Her Mom Had Thoughts About ‘Bridgerton’
Coughlan also joked about wanting a clean-cut version of ‘Bridgerton’ so she could watch it with her mother.
According to Coughlan, Netflix told her, “No one gets that…you can do it for yourself on Final Cut Pro.”
She said her mother still comments on her shows, even when Coughlan is not responsible for the writing. “I get told off by my mum quite a lot,” she said. “Like, even when she first watched ‘Derry Girls’ and there was a lot of swearing in it…I was like, ‘I didn’t even write it!’”
Coughlan said her mother expected ‘Bridgerton’ to feel more like ‘Downton Abbey,’ then quickly realized that was not the case. “She was like, ‘I don’t know why they’re doing that,’” Coughlan said. “I was like, ‘It’s not quite that!’”
