Nicola Coughlan is right: ‘body positivity’ traps us in the same old conversations | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

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 Nicola 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

Mar 8, 2026 → Mar 8, 2026