Bridgerton’s Nicola Coughlan on watching show’s sex scenes with her mother

The Irish actress plays Penelope Featherington on the wildly popular Bridgerton, which has recently been named Netflix’s most popular original series ever.

Speaking on the Make It Reign with Josh Smith podcast, Coughlan joked she fast-forwarded through an episode to avoid watching some of the steamy scenes with her mother.

She said: “I knew pretty well how the episodes went and the amount of sexiness in them. When I showed her the first episode and Johnny Bailey’s bum appeared very quickly into episode one, She was like, ‘What is going on?’ I had to say, ‘It’s not my fault I didn’t write it, it’s romance novels and it’s a really important part of the story,’ but I was still in trouble.

“Then with episode six I thought, ‘oh my God what am I going to do? It’s non-stop shagging! I am going to be in so much trouble’.

“What I ended up doing was just fast-forwarding through all the sexy bits and at the end of the episode she said, ‘that one was very short!’”

Coughlan, 34, was previously best known for her role in Channel 4 sitcom Derry Girls.

Before Bridgerton’s release on Christmas Day last year, she admitted she feared the show would not be a hit.

Coughlan said: “Before Bridgerton came out, I knew it was coming out on the biggest streaming service in the world on Christmas Day but there was still a part of me that went, ‘Is anyone going to watch this and I need to get people to watch it’.

“So on Christmas day, I was going no-one has watched it, no-one will watch this show. I just fully had a moment where I was like, ‘it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine, I’ve dedicated a year and a half of my life to it and I know hundreds of people put in so many months of their life into it but it is fine, no-one will watch it,’ and I’ve just accepted that.”

In fact, Netflix said Bridgerton is its biggest ever original series after it was viewed by a record 82 million households in 28 days.