Some years ago, before fame smiled on her, the Irish actress Nicholas Coughlan I worked in an optician. Today, her life is different since she plays Penelope Featherington or Lady Whistledown, the anonymous hack who criticizes bourgeois society in Regency England in the series ‘Bridgerton‘, which premiered its second season on Netflix. “It’s a very strange thing to realize that you are part of a global phenomenon,” she says of the success of the production of Netflix—. We looked at the numbers, and there’s no way a human mind can process that. It’s unreal.”
In this second season her character shoots up, more so now that it has been discovered that Penelope is also Lady Whistledown. “Season 2 is like Penelope’s Britney Spears period: she’s not a girl, but she’s not a woman yet. You’ve definitely made progress, but you’re not quite there yet. After the big reveal at the end of last season, we start to see his Whistledown side start to seep into his daily life. We start to see Penelope and Whistledown get together, and it’s so much fun to act because it’s almost like she’s playing two completely different roles,” she says.
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Also, her love life is still a bit of a mess. “It remains as complicated and one-sided as ever. Her relationship with Colin Bridgerton has progressed because they are pen pals while Colin travels. I think Penelope finds it easier to express herself that way and she’s more authentic when she’s with Colin than she is when she’s interacting with other people.”
The actress herself is surprised by how she found out that Penelope was Lady Whistledown. “It was on a fan forum on the internet and I was blown away, I couldn’t believe it. Being cast in this series is exciting, but discovering this secret was even better. We didn’t know if they were going to reveal it at the end of Season 1, but Chris Van Dusen, our showrunner, told me, ‘We think it makes sense to reveal it, considering where we want to take Penelope in Season 2.’ I feel like when a show has characters with secret identities, and that goes on for a long time, it’s not worth it in the end. Now, it’s going to be a lot more fun for everyone to watch Penelope, knowing that she has to be very low-key.”
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Why do you think Penelope created this alter ego for herself?
Penelope is practically a stranger in her family. She is good at separating things. She grabs something and says, ‘Well, I’m not going to deal with this right now,’ and she files it away. I think she would love to be more direct, Eloise-style, but she doesn’t have that character. She is a true classic writer. Many writers are like that. Sometimes you meet someone who has written the most outrageous things, but she is the most reserved person in the group. I think she’s been used to just watching her whole life. She is, but no one looks at her or speaks to her. She also has something of Matilda, something like: ‘I will take revenge on you with intelligence’”.
The 35-year-old actress studied at the Oxford School of Drama and began to make a name for herself on the series ‘Derry Girls’. in which she played a student at a convent school in Northern Ireland in the 90’s. This time, Penelope went back in time and has been forced to wear corsets and learn to dance as it was done in the Regency. “The dance scenes are absolutely epic, and the amount of work that goes into creating them is as well. It takes longer than people think because you have hundreds of people ready and weeks of planning just for the wigs. One of the dresses I wore this season had hand appliqués and weighed a ton. The choreography is incredible. Our choreographer, Sean “Jack” Murphy, uses a lot of modern music, and then we put our Regency twist on it.”
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