The Wee Dreamer
Nicola Coughlan is about to burst onto our screens in the second season of the colourful period drama Bridgerton. Andrea Smith traces her rise to fame.
Nicola Coughlan probably couldn't have imagined when she was growing up in Galway that she would have roles in two very high-profile shows that would make her world-famous. Or that she would be named on Vogue’s best-dressed women of 2021 list.
Over the course of a few short years, Nicola has become one of our best-loved actresses thanks to her performances in Derry Girls and Bridgerton, but things weren’t always easy for the actress whose sparkling personality has won her legions of fans.
Nicola struggled to get her foot on the acting ladder and was broke at various times, and she almost considered giving up her dream. Then, when she made it big, she had to contend with people commenting on her body.
In a move that should prove inspirational to young women, Nicola recently posted a request on social media, asking followers politely, but firmly, not to comment on her appearance.
“If you have an opinion about my body please, please don’t share it with me,” she said. “It’s really hard to take the weight of thousands of opinions on how you look being sent directly to you every day.”
Having her body critiqued rightfully exasperates the actress, and while she is funny and charming in person, she has an inner steel and is well able to defend herself.
When a British Theatre Guide reviewer described her character as an “overweight little girl” in a review of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Nicola took to Twitter to call the publication out. She pointed out that in a previous review of her role in the play Jess and Joe Forever, the same reviewer called her character a “fat girl”. “My weight has no relevance to either the performance I gave in that or in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” she wrote, adding that the writer was not welcome to review any of her other performances.
MIND-BLOWING FAME
Most of us first became aware of Nicola when Derry Girls aired in 2018. The Channel 4 sitcom about a group of teens coping with life, school, families and the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the early 1990s became a smash hit.
She may be 35, but Nicola looks so youthful, she was cast as 16-year-old Clare Devlin. The adorably nervous, fast-speaking “wee lesbian” is one of the best characters in the show, and the role showcased the actress’s impeccable comic timing.
It also introduced her to audiences here and in the UK and led to her being cast as the bookish Penelope Featherington in the glorious Bridgerton. When the first season of the period costume drama aired on Netflix in 2021, Nicola’s fame reached stratospheric levels. An eye-watering 82 million people tuned in to watch the juicy scandals and sexploits of the posh British aristocrats of Regency England in 1813, based on Julia Quinn's novels.
Kate Middleton is a fan, and Nicola’s fame has reached such heights that she now counts Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness among her friends.
“It's crazy to think that something you made has been seen by that many people in the world,” she told Tatler.
“It's quite mind-blowing.” Bridgerton was released during the pandemic, and Nicola thinks it aired at a time when people were seeking something colourful, fun and entertaining.
“It was such an escape, and unapologetically joyful – there’s no cynicism to it,” she told the Observer.
Bridgerton is set in the competitive world of London's season, when debutantes are presented at court.
WARNING: Readers who haven’t watched the show yet should avoid the next few paragraphs as they contain spoilers.
FINDING HER PASSION
The delicious drama is stirred up by Lady Whistledown, a clandestine Gossip Girl type narrator who fills the other characters in on the drama and secret scandals going on under their noses via newsletters she publishes. The character is narrated by none other than veteran star of The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins, Julie Andrews.
“When I found out that Julie Andrews had been cast, I started crying,” Nicola admitted. “This was crazy to me.”
Lady Penelope is the quiet, studious daughter of Lord and Lady Featherington, and her family enjoys poking fun at her skin, weight and love of writing. Although she languishes on the fringes of society, it is revealed at the very last minute of season one that Penelope is in fact, Lady Whistledown.
“Selfishly, as an actor, I got to have so much fun,” Nicola said of the delicious role. While the belle of the ball in season one was Daphne Bridgerton, played by Phoebe Dynevor whose real-life mum is Sally Dynevor (Sally in Coronation Street), the dramatic revelation at the end of season one means all eyes will be on Nicola’s character and the actress herself during season two.
While it is a dream role, the schedule for Bridgerton is intense. Speaking on Laura Whitmore’s Castaway podcast, Nicola explained how she was collected at 4.30am each day for filming, and would spend two-and-a-half hours in hair, makeup and wardrobe. She would arrive home at 8pm and go straight to bed.
While the two characters that made her famous couldn’t be more different to each other, Nicola’s own life as a young woman was quite different too.
Her dad was in the army, and she grew up in the quiet town of Oranmore. She is the youngest of four children, and has three older siblings, Kieran, Gráinne and Clodagh.
Her love affair with acting began when she was six, and saw Clodagh in a school production of Calamity Jane. Nicola loved watching films and was fascinated by accents, leading to Kieran buying her a camcorder for Christmas.
It opened up what she describes as “a world of possibilities” as she could make little films with friends. “What I could make, what I could do,” she recalls. “It felt like magic.”
EARLY STRUGGLES
Nicola attended Scoil Mhuire in Oranmore, and she loved speech and drama classes there. She credits the classes with giving her faith in herself. Her teacher, Claire Power, also acted as her agent and when Nicola was 14, she had a taste of the industry when she was hired to provide voice-overs of princesses and mice for a cartoon.
While she knew she wanted to be an actress, Nicola wasn’t sure it was possible. She went to NUI Galway to study English and Classics and even went to study abroad in Malta for a year.
While at college, she became involved in the college’s drama society, Dramsoc. She then went on to do a foundation course at Oxford School of Drama before starting at Birmingham School of Acting. She was clearly impressive as prestigious UK theatre and entertainment publication, The Stage, placed her on a list of the “ones to watch” after seeing her perform at a student showcase.
Despite this accolade, things didn’t go too well for Nicola initially. “I didn't do anything for several years after that, so you could be ‘watching’ me but I wasn't really achieving very much,” she explained on the Netflix series, Made in Ireland.
Nicola was going to auditions in the UK and wasn’t really having much luck, and she had to return home to Galway. “I couldn't afford it any more so I was living back home and felt like a big failure,” she admitted. “I was working at an optician’s two days per week.”
It will probably come as a surprise to learn that Nicola considered giving up acting, but she had applied for “a million things” and hadn't been successful.
She was also in debt as she had taken out a loan to pay for drama school. “I say all the time: ‘Yes, money doesn’t make you happy’ – but unless you’ve been really broke, you don’t know the stress, how it takes up all of your time and sucks the joy,” she told The Observer.
On the bus home from her day job one day, Nicola saw a tweet from the Old Vic theatre saying it was holding an open call for its New Voices festival. She applied and got an audition, and went on to win a role in the play Jess and Joe Forever.
Nicola was nominated for Best Female Performance in The Off West End Theatre Awards for this role, and she signed to the Curtis Brown agency.
Things got even better when she was offered the role in Derry Girls after a six-month process of auditions and meetings, although the actress wasn’t that familiar with the Derry accent prior to taking on the role.
When she appeared on The Graham Norton Show, she revealed that she took inspiration from Girls’ Aloud singer Nadine Coyle. Or, more specifically, from the infamous incident where Nadine fibbed about her age on the programme Popstars in 2001 and had to leave the show.
She and Norton had great fun regaling the audience with the tale, which has become embedded in the annals of Irish pop culture history.
While playing Clare Devlin would prove to be a turning point for Nicola, it was tinged with sadness as her dad passed away five days before she found out she had the role.
“He sadly didn’t know I ever got it,” she said. “At the end of day, all of us just want to make our parents proud.”
The role led to American TV production company Shondaland calling Nicola up for the role of Penelope Featherington in Bridgerton. She is now known in Hollywood and has 1.3 million Instagram followers, and even began communicating with Kim Kardashian after she revealed on Twitter that the Kardashians were the basis for the Featherington family. Nicola has remained grounded and unaffected, and says she wants to continue playing interesting women.
She dreams of playing Sally Bowles in the musical Cabaret.
At this rate, agents and producers will surely be queuing to sign her up, and we at Woman’s Way can’t wait to see what she does next.
Catch Nicola in the third and final season of Derry Girls later this year, and in season two of Bridgerton on Netflix on March 25th