The Bridgerton star has told of her horror at being approached by a fan who only wanted to talk about her body. Surely it’s time we focused on something else
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icola Coughlan is sick of the subject of “body positivity”, and thank God, because so am I. “The thing I say sometimes that pisses people off is I have no interest in body positivity,” she said in a recent interview. Like Coughlan and no doubt many, many other women, I’m sick of talking about it, thinking about it, reading about it, all of it (I do recognise a certain irony in my writing about it, but hear me out). In the same interview, Coughlan recounted an encounter with a fan: “I remember this really drunk girl once talking to me in a bathroom being like, ‘I loved [Bridgerton] because of your body’ and started talking about my body, and I was like, ‘I want to die. I hate this so much.’”
She continued: “It’s really hard when you work on something for months and months of your life, you don’t see your family, you really dedicate yourself and then it comes down to what you look like – it’s so fucking boring.”
Coughlan – a brilliant actor – has been particularly unfortunate, in that her body is the talking point that will not leave her alone. Even at times when, as she pointed out, she is a size 10, she is still talked about as “plus-sized”. In some ways, it reminds me of Kate Winslet in the early days of her fame. The tone of the conversation is different; Winslet was subjected to the merciless misogyny and body fascism of 1990s media, while Coughlan is held up as a “body-positive role model” as part of a pushback against it. Yet both actors have faced a similar battle: wanting to make good work that they care about in their chosen art form, and finding that all anyone seems to want to talk about is their supposedly “atypical” bodies.
