In January, right around her 35th birthday, Irish actress Nicola Coughlan took what she called "a mega-holiday" — New York City; Austin, Texas; Hawaii, New York City again.
Back in Manhattan, she played tourist: she ate at fancy restaurants, went to a taping of Saturday Night Live (not quite the tourist, she went to the after-party, too), and saw a Broadway show.
The show was Company, a musical about a 35-year-old in the midst of an existential crisis, and as Coughlan left the theatre, she saw a towering Times Square billboard. The billboard, an ad for the new season of the saucy Netflix costume drama Bridgerton, showed her own face at the centre.
"We walked up the street a little bit and there it was, like, huge, huge, huge," she said. "Oh my goodness, it was massive."
Coughlan — chirpy, confiding, with the most perfect skin I have ever seen on an adult human — was speaking at the end of her trip, just before she flew back home to London. She had selected an Irish pub, Molly's Shebeen, in Gramercy Park, and arrived a few minutes late because her car had first taken her instead to Molly Wee, a different pub near Penn Station.
Molly's seemed like a parody of an Irish pub. "I enjoy this interpretation," she said. Coughlan is not above a bit of parody herself. She carries a leprechaun key ring and her Instagram bio reads "Small Irish Acting Person."
That afternoon she wore winter white — as a self-described "messy bastard", this was her version of risk-taking — and a small horde of delicate gold jewelry, including a nameplate necklace. The fans at the pub, who recognised her from the widely celebrated Netflix comedy Derry Girls, knew her name already.
Derry Girls gave Coughlan — who had been working at an optician's office in her hometown, Galway, Ireland, only a year before she was cast — her first substantial role. That role eventually led to the one in Bridgerton, which became one of Netflix's most-watched series ever and returns for its second season on March 25.
As a star of two of the most beloved shows on the world's largest streaming service, Coughlan is now kind of a big deal. With a billboard to prove it.
For Coughlan, the youngest daughter of an army officer father and a homemaker mother, success didn't come overnight; it came over thousands of nights. After college, where she studied English and classics, she enrolled in a six-month foundation course at the Oxford School of Drama. She was turned down for the multiyear course. Then she followed her new best friend, playwright Camilla Whitehill, to the Birmingham School of Acting, where she completed a one-year course. She was turned down for the multiyear one there, too.
At Oxford, and then at Birmingham, Coughlan developed a gift for comedy and, because she has always looked mind-bendingly young for her age, a knack for playing children. (Yes, she moisturises, but she showed me photos on her phone and looking mind-bendingly young is a family trait.)
Afterward, she moved to London, where she took a series of retail jobs — beauty products, frozen yogurt — and tried to find work as a grown-up actor. She didn't succeed. Petite, pert, childlike, she couldn't attract the interest of a manager or an agent. More than once, her bank balance dropped to double digits. More than once, she had to move back home.
"It was like, oh, the dream died," she said.
But it didn't, not quite. Whitehill remembers how Coughlan tempered each defeat with a kind of resilience. "Deep, deep down, she believed in herself," Whitehill said on a video call. "She did have some awful — like, truly, truly awful — part-time jobs that were depressing as hell. But I never really doubted her."
Finally, Coughlan, by then nearly 30, landed a role as a posh 15-year-old girl in the 2016 two-hander Jess and Joe Forever, at the Orange Tree Theatre in London. Her performance attracted the interest of an agent, who secured her an audition for Derry Girls, a comedy about a group of schoolgirls — and one boy — in Northern Ireland in the 1990s, at the periphery of the country's sectarian conflict. The audition was rigorous: a six-month process of callbacks and chemistry reads.
"It was torture," she said. "I wanted it so badly."
Coughlan studied up on Northern Irish accents and she put together a whole notebook for her character, the high-achieving, high-anxiety, 16-year-old "wee lesbian" Clare. Lisa McGee, who created Derry Girls, remembers that notebook, which had Clare's name in glitter on the front.
"She had written loads of stuff about the character, and I thought, you've done more work than me on this character," McGee said.
Coughlan approached the role with a sense of both heedlessness and complete calculation, qualities she would later bring to Bridgerton. McGee marvelled at the speed and precision of her comic timing.
"I could write more jokes for Clare once I saw the way Nicola was playing her," McGee said.
Even then, Coughlan wasn't sure that she would find another job. "I was like, Well, that's it now. I struck gold, but it won't happen again," she said. She whiffed on several subsequent auditions and when the producers of Bridgerton contacted her agent, she didn't hold out much hope.
An assistant casting director brought her in to read for Eloise Bridgerton, the spunky, free-thinking fifth-born sibling. Coughlan didn't think that the audition had gone particularly well. But when the showrunner Chris Van Dusen saw her tape, he knew he had to cast her as Penelope Featherington, Eloise's 17-year-old best friend.
"I called all of our other producers into the room and showed them the tape," Van Dusen recalled. "I'm happy to say that everyone loved her as much as I did."
Told that she had the part, Coughlan tempered her enthusiasm. She had known plenty of actors who were hired onto prestige projects and then fired when the studio demanded a bigger name. "I should have been like, this is amazing," she said. "Instead, I was like, this is fishy. I don't know about this." She remained tense throughout the first table read.
But she wasn't fired. And in the midst of her fittings, she finally learned, via a Reddit forum, how large her role would be and that it was effectively two roles: the wallflower Penelope — the face she presents to the world — and also the cunning Lady Whistledown, the nom de plume Penelope uses to write and publish a scandal sheet with the power to bring Regency England to its petticoated knees.
She threw herself into the dual role, even as the wig and costume designers of Bridgerton fitted her with tight red ringlets and unflattering yellow dresses. "She really suits most colours, but they've managed to find the ones that really clash," Whitehill said. (Coughlan had a more measured response to her wardrobe. "You can't have vanity in acting," she said.)
The Lady Whistledown reveal doesn't come until the final episode of Season 1. But from the first script, Coughlan strategised where Penelope needed to stand in order to overhear the gossip that Lady Whistledown would later publish. If you re-watch the first season, you can see her lurking in the background, watching and listening.
She practised eavesdropping in her downtime, too, a habit she now can't break. (Earlier that day, before she had met me, she had gone for a manicure and learned a lot about someone else's bathroom renovation.) "It's amazing what people will say when they don't think you're listening," she said.
For Season 2, she added another role. When delivering Lady Whistledown's copy to the printer, Penelope pretends to be an Irish maid. The character is unnamed in the script but Coughlan calls her Bridget Bridgerton and uses a strong Dublin accent. A Drag Race superfan, Coughlan thought of this alter ego as "Penelope's drag character".
The show will bring further challenges in the future because eventually Penelope will play out her own love story. It comes in the fourth book of the series of novels that inspired the show, Romancing Mister Bridgerton, so it may or may not comprise the fourth season. (The show has already been renewed through Season 4.) But already "I feel terrified," Coughlan said. "I'm probably more comfortable being awkward and funny, so it's going to be a massive challenge for me. Because it's not my comfort zone."
The attention that Bridgerton has brought hasn't always been comfortable either. "Fame is a weird thing," she said.
The worst part has been the online scrutiny of her body. Many of the comments about her appearance have been positive, though some have been negative. She doesn't find any of them helpful. "I'm like, I'm existing," she said. "And it's not anyone's business." It was the one subject she seemed less than delighted to discuss.
A week after we met, she took to Instagram to ask her followers not to send her any comments on her body. "It's really hard to take the weight of thousands of opinions on how you look being sent directly to you every day," she wrote.
Still, fame has its upsides. She appeared on The Great British Baking Show. ("Most definitely the best experience of my life," she said, despite the mess she made of her Swiss roll.) She became close friends with Queer Eye star Jonathan Van Ness after she made a hoodie with his face on it and showed it off on social media. When she went to Saturday Night Live, she and Kristen Wiig hugged. Her handbag game is extremely on point. (That day at Molly's, she had a cheeky Chanel clutch.)
And she is eager to see where her career will take her. Maybe she'll host Saturday Night Live one day. Maybe she'll finally play a character of legal age.
"In a weird way," she said. "I feel like I'm just getting started."
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alexis Soloski
Photographs by: Elliott Verdier
© 2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
