Dear Readers, Nicola Coughlan has kindly requested you refrain from making remarks about her body.
The Irish actress, who portrays Penelope Featherington on Netflix's steamy period drama series Bridgerton, took to Twitter asking fans to stop dishing out their opinions about her body.
She tweeted in Jan. 30, "Hello! So just a thing- if you have an opinion about my body please, please don't share it with me."
Nicola, 35, explained the reasoning behind her decision, writing, "Most people are being nice and not trying to be offensive but I am just one real life human being and it's really hard to take the weight of thousands of opinions on how you look being sent directly to you every day."
She added, "If you have an opinion about me that's ok, I understand I'm on TV and that people will have things to think and say but I beg you not to send it to me directly."
Along with her plea, Nicola, who also stars in Netflix's 1990s-set hit Derry Girls, posted a mirror selfie in which she's seen wearing a colorful floral top with a Peter-Pan collar.
Fans quickly came to the actress' defense and praised her for speaking out against bodyshaming. One fan commented, "Thank you for being real, being honest, being yourself."
Another fan tweeted back, "You are so talented and gorgeous that I can't believe anyone could have anything else to say!"
This isn't the first time Nicola has addressed the issue. In 2018 she wrote an op-ed for The Guardian titled, "Critics, judge me for my work in Derry Girls and on the stage, not on my body." In the powerful piece, she recalled feeling hurt while starring in the play The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
"The first review I saw had just this to say of my performance: ‘Nicola Coughlan as Joyce Emily, the kind of overweight little girl who will always become the butt of her fellows' immature humour,'" she wrote. "Everything I'd done to create my character had been reduced to a hurtful word and casual comment on my appearance."
Back in March, after she was referred to as "the fat girl from Bridgerton" in a cruel social media comment, Nicola aired her frustration in a series of tweets.
"Can we please stop asking women about their weight in interviews, especially when it completely irrelevant," she wrote. "Every time I'm asked about my body in an interview it makes me deeply uncomfortable and so sad I'm not just allowed to just talk about the job I do that I so love."
She continued, "It's so reductive to women when we're making great strides for diversity in the arts, but questions like that just pull us backwards. Also, and I mean this in the nicest way ah possible, I'm not a body positivity activist, I'm an actor I would lose or gain weight if an important role requirement. My body is the tool I use to tell stories, not what I define myself by."
Nicola, who is currently gearing up for Bridgerton's second season premiere on March 25, concluded her statement by wishing that her body was never discussed again.
"It would really love to never be asked about it in an interview again, also I have so many other things I love to talk about, I'm Irish so I can talk till the cows come home."