Just as thrilling as Colin’s declaration of love is the heated nod of consent she gives him before they physically escalate their encounter. “Because she’s also desired him for so long,” says Coughlan. “We realize later on, she doesn’t know about sex fully, but she’s aware of her body and where she wants him to touch her. It’s lovely because it’s so easy to see virgins on TV portrayed in a way that they’re like terrified and have no agency, but that’s not the case. The consent is managed so beautifully, and that’s down to the writing and the brilliant Lizzy Talbot, the intimacy coordinator, because we want it to seem like it’s not teacher-student anymore. We’re in this together. It’s the first time that they completely see each other and they’re on a level and it’s like, Let’s go.”
After their Pitbull-scored—and approved!—tryst comes to an end, Colin hops out of the carriage. “It makes me so sad for her that she thinks he’s walking away,” says Coughlan. “Because she’s just so used to stuff going wrong. And you’re like, ‘It’s not going wrong this time. It’s not going wrong!’” Instead, Colin utters a proposition straight out of Quinn’s novel: “For God’s sake, Penelope Featherington, are you going to marry me or not?” Coughlan knows it’ll be difficult for fans to await her answer in season three, part two. “People are going to have our heads. It’s only a couple of weeks. They’ll live.”
Even three seasons in, Coughlan finds it hard to grasp how huge Bridgerton has become. “It’s too bizarre and overwhelming because you film it in such a bubble,” she says. “Then the sheer scale of it and the love that people have for it—I don’t know if I’ll ever take it in. Maybe when I’m 80 I’ll be like, ‘Whoa, I was in that show and it meant that to people.’”
Coughlan, who booked Derry Girls at the age of 31, says that finding success when she did informed her ability to absorb all of the attention while giving her best to the press. “People say, ‘Was it media training?’” she says. “I’m like, No, it was working in retail, where I had to sell face creams and you have to say hi to everyone that came in, giving everyone the freshest version of yourself.”
Her years spent shilling skincare and scooping frozen yogurt linger. “I used to get about eight British pounds an hour when I was working,” Coughlan says. That’s not a lot, particularly in a nation that doesn’t have much of a tipping culture. Actors who hit pay dirt immediately are at something of a disadvantage, she says: when you “get this insane job and all of the perks that come with it at a young age, it would seem like that’s normal,” she says. “And I’m hyperaware that it’s not.” Now 37, Coughlan is glad things unfolded for her in the order they have. “I’m sure if me in my 20s could see me now going, ‘I wouldn’t change a thing,’ I’d be really annoyed, but life experience, yeah, you can’t buy that. You gotta go through it.”
During the final three weeks of production on season three, Coughlan split her time between Bridgerton and a leading role on the Tubi series Big Mood, a sardonic comedy created by her best friend, Camilla Whitehill. “God, it was so intense…. It’s really hard to explain, and it makes me laugh because I said [in another interview], ‘I just kept crying.’ Then it was picked up as a headline. It was like, ‘She kept bursting into tears on set.’ I’m like, No, no, no, no, no. We need context.”
During the week, Coughlan donned ball gowns as Penelope. On weekends, she’d zip through modern-day London as Juicy Couture tracksuit-clad Maggie, a writer diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder. All of the crying “was partly exhaustion,” she says, and partially prompted by the profound experience of making this chapter of Bridgerton. “I’d never had such a good partner like I’d had in Luke,” says Coughlan, who may keep a Polaroid of herself and Newton tucked inside her phone case. “Then with Big Mood…acting-wise, that was the most challenging role I’ve ever had to play.” Even though the characters are “chalk and cheese”—a cheeky British idiom for polar opposites—“they’re so inextricably linked in my head,” she says. “Once I finished, I was so spent. I was like, I got nothing left.”
But Coughlan isn’t retreating to the shadows anytime soon. “I’ve actually just gotten a new job that will start right after the press tour,” she says. “So, no rest for the wicked. But it’s super different to anything I’ve ever done, and with some really good people.” (Deadline later reported that Coughlan will lead the upcoming thriller-drama Love And War, based on the real-life story of an Irish woman’s fight to rescue her six-year-old daughter from war-torn Syria.) Then there is the fourth season of Bridgerton, in which Coughlan and Newton will return to christen a new couple. “People are like, ‘Are you sad that you’re not the main love story?’ I’m weirdly not, only because I feel like I couldn’t have given it anything more,” she says. “I don’t have any regrets. I feel like I’ve left it all on the pitch.”