‘Everything she’s made is perfect’: the director Nicola Coughlan believes can do no wrong
It’s always fun and quite refreshing whenever a big-name actor decides to neatly sidestep the panicked protestations of their PR people or the expectations of the media and just say whatever it is they want to, regardless of how much pearl-clutching it might generate, like Nicola Coughlan, and long may it continue.
For some reason, despite her brilliant work in comedy and in drama on screens both big and small, the leading subject people seem to want to talk to her about, or write about, is body positivity, a subject she quite understandably describes as “fucking boring”, because she must be exhausted by it frankly.
So instead lets focus on what she has coming up instead, and on the people she’s looked to for inspiration over a career that’s so far spanned more than 20 years. Fresh from another stint in Netflix’s globe-dominating bodice-ripper Bridgerton, Coughlan is now setting her sights on the assorted muppets of the internet by taking a leaf out of Louis Theroux’s book and investigating the ‘manosphere’, except she’ll be doing it in a Channel 4 drama called I Am Helen in which her co-star Joe Cole plays her partner falling deeper and deeper under the spell of Andrew Tate and the like.
She’ll also be doing another series of Big Mood on the same channel next month, the comedy that began in 2024 and that, alongside Bridgerton, has seen her pick up several industry award wins and nominations, including a Bafta and a Screen Actors’ Guild nod. But it was the previous year that she got a first real taste of global fame thanks to the billion-dollar grossing day-glo toy musical Barbie alongside Margot Robbie.
Coughlan had a role as ‘Diplomat Barbie’ in the blockbuster, a part that was originally more prominent but had to be cut down due to scheduling issues with her doing Bridgerton. Nevertheless, it was a first taste of Hollywood proper for the actor and an opportunity for her to work with a director she had long idolised in Greta Gerwig.
Couglan told FM104 at the time, “Greta’s been one of my favourite filmmakers since Francis Ha, how I watched that when I was like a properly struggling actor, I’d moved to London in my 20s, and everything she’s made has just been perfect. I think people haven’t gotten the fact yet that this is a Greta Gerwig movie. Yes, it’s Barbie, and it’s pink and fabulous, but it’s got such heart integrity. It’s got the most incredible ensemble cast. To be in this movie for two seconds, I feel incredibly privileged.”
After the release of Frances Ha back in 2012, a film Gerwig starred in and co-wrote with her future husband and fellow director Noah Baumbach, she began to rise through the ranks in Hollywood and in 2017 had huge acclaim with Lady Bird starring Saoirse Ronan, which picked up five Academy Award nominations including a ‘Best Director’ shout for Gerwig at her first time of asking.
She went one better two years later with the period drama Little Women, again with Ronan, which collected six nominations and one win at the Oscars. Coming up, her agenda will be the film that could even outdo Barbie in terms of scale, her adaptation of Narnia starring Daniel Craig and Carey Mulligan, which is due out toward the end of this year.
Coughlan, meanwhile, will be back on the big screen in The Magic Faraway Tree at the end of this month, a film co-starring Andrew Garfield that looks a bit like what might happen if you took a shedload of psychedelic drugs and wandered into a family’s house in the richest part of Knightsbridge.
