There it was, on the table in Nicola Coughlan’s apartment — a microscopic undergarment that loomed large in the actor’s mind.
The “Bridgerton” costume department had sent Coughlan home with a piece of intimacy wear that was essentially a strapless thong that would cover the bare essentials of her body during an upcoming love scene.
It would be her first time ever acting in such a scene, in a series known globally for its sexy yet empowering bedroom romps, and it would require her to be almost totally naked in front of people she’d worked with for years. Coughlan was understandably terrified. One night, she poured herself a margarita and summoned the liquid courage to try on the tiny sliver of fabric.
“I went to the bathroom and looked in the full-length mirror. I was like, ‘Absolutely not.’ I hid it down the bottom of the laundry basket,” Coughlan recalled on a cold morning in January at Netflix’s offices in Manhattan. “I was like, ‘How am I going to do this?’”
Coughlan eventually got over her nerves. Much to her surprise, she found the process of filming the scenes with her co-star Luke Newton creatively satisfying — liberating, even. “By the end of the day, we were both lying under a blanket, not clothed, just chillin’. We were like, ‘This is why nudists do it,’” said Coughlan, who speaks in a rapid, melodious accent that only adds to her natural exuberance.
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While discussing the arc of her career, she goes on joyful digressions, praising everything from Mrs. Renfro’s salsa to Ryan Gosling’s performance in the forgotten teen series “Breaker High” to “Saturday Night Live,” which she’s just attended for the third time and hopes to host one day (are you listening, Lorne Michaels?).
Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton) and Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) go from friends to lovers in Season 3 of “Bridgerton.”
(Liam Daniel / Netflix)
She is nothing if not enthusiastic, and she brings this level of passion to Season 3 of “Bridgerton,” the first half of which will return to Netflix on Thursday. Until now, her character, Penelope Featherington, has been content to be a wallflower in the ballrooms of Regency London, allowing her to observe and secretly write a society scandal sheet under the pseudonym Lady Whistledown.
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But this season will focus on Penelope as she — spoiler alert — consummates her long-simmering crush on Colin Bridgerton (Newton) in a friends-to-lovers storyline with distinct rom-com overtones. Penelope’s move into the center of the narrative also meant that Coughlan faced new pressures as the lead in one of the most watched and dissected shows on Netflix.
“With Penelope this season, it felt like there were so many things that were reflected in real life. The whole theme of her stepping out of the shadows and into the light, and not feeling quite ready — I felt like I had to do that,” said Coughlan.
“It was really challenging. It was terrifying. It was cathartic. It was a million and one things,” she added. “I loved it.”
She juggled “Bridgerton” with an edgy turn in “Big Mood,” a “Fleabag”-esque dark comedy released last month on Tubi. On top of that, she also had a small role in the biggest box office hit of 2023, “Barbie” — she wanted to do more but, alas, her schedule was too packed — and filmed a guest appearance in the “Doctor Who” Christmas special to be released later this year.
It amounts to a long-simmering breakout moment for Coughlan, who is 37 but thanks to a preternaturally dewy complexion often plays characters who are much younger than she is, like a Catholic high school student in the Troubles-themed sitcom “Derry Girls.”
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“It was very exciting to play grown women. But I was like, ‘Can I do that?’ Even in drama school, they would always cast me as the random kid, like, there was an Ibsen play called ‘Little Eyolf,’ and I had to play Eyolf. I was like, ‘This is gonna be me forever.’”
Raised in County Galway on the western coast of Ireland, she grew up liking whatever her older siblings were into — whether it was Nirvana or “Wayne’s World.” When her sister starred in the school play, Coughlan showed up in a sequined vest, looking like a little Liza Minnelli — as if she knew she also wanted to be onstage. (She still has a taste for eccentric glamour: Despite the wintry gloom, she’s decked out in a gold spangled dress and a cloud-like ruffled bolero.)
At age 9, she scored her first professional gig, a movie called “My Brother’s War” starring James Brolin. She got the day off from school, but she wanted more. “I used to look at the Olsen twins. I was like, ‘God, look, look at where they are,’” she joked. As a teenager, she did regular voice work in cartoons. Her father, who was in the Irish army (as a teenage cadet, he took part in U.S. President Kennedy’s funeral in 1963), and mother, a stay-at-home parent, were supportive but also baffled by their youngest child’s dramatic streak. “It’s really not in my family at all,” Coughlan said.
After graduating from the National University of Ireland Galway, Coughlan enrolled in a foundational course at the Oxford School of Drama in England, where she quickly bonded with fellow student Camilla Whitehill.
“We were the only people there that really cared about things being funny,” said Whitehill, a playwright who would go on to create “Big Mood” as a vehicle for her old drama school friend. “Everyone else just wanted to do plays where their family had died, or whatever.”
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Nicola Coughlan on playing Penelope this season: “The whole theme of her stepping out of the shadows and into the light, and not feeling quite ready — I felt like I had to do that.”
(Evelyn Freja / For The Times)
Coughlan, ever the pop culture connoisseur, introduced Whitehill to the sitcom “Arrested Development.”
“She’s one of those people who, if she thinks you will like something, she will make you watch it. And she is — annoyingly — usually right,” added Whitehill. (More recently, Coughlan urged her friend to catch up on “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.” “It’s such an easy one to sell to people. I’m like, ‘One of them is a cult leader who’s married to her granddad; are you in or are you out?’” Coughlan said.)
They both eventually landed in London, where “neither of us was successful at all for our whole 20s,” said Whitehill, who would often cast Coughlan in “my bad unpaid short plays at pubs,” including one where Coughlan played a cat.
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“You leave drama school, which is a lovely, cozy bosom where you get to do the thing you love every day. Then you go, ‘Hang on. Thousands of people leave drama school every year, and they want to do the exact job I do.’ It seems so improbable that you’ll make a living doing it,” said Coughlan. “I felt like a loser at so many points.”
One such nadir came when she was working at a frozen yogurt shop at a mall in West London and the cheap jeans she wore as part of her uniform tore “right up the butt crack.” It was sobering, she said. “I was like, ‘This is not the life I wanted.’”
By the time she was in her late 20s, she’d moved back home and was working for an optician in Galway. Then she saw a listing for an open casting call for a festival of plays being put on by the Old Vic Theatre. Even though she was broke, she flew back to London for the audition and landed a part in a play called “Jess and Joe Forever.”
It marked a turning point for Coughlan, who was soon cast as studious teen Clare Devlin in Channel 4’s “Derry Girls,” a project she was drawn to because of its vividly drawn female characters.
“They were all really distinct — young women who were ballsy and foul-mouthed,” she said. She convinced herself that the show would flop because “people hate women trying to be funny.” Instead, the show was a massive hit in the U.K. and earned a devoted following in the U.S. when it was picked up by Netflix.
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Colin (Luke Newton) finally takes notice of Penelope (Nicola Coughlan) in Season 3, who trades in tight curls and garish-hued dresses for loose waves and outfits in cool blues and greens.
(Liam Daniel / Netflix)
Then, Shonda Rhimes came calling about “Bridgerton.” After a single audition, Coughlan was cast as Penelope, a thoughtful, sharp-witted young woman with an overbearing mother and tacky, dim-witted sisters. Season 1 was released in late 2020, when much of the world was staying home because of the COVID-19 pandemic-related closures, and it became a sensation.
Whitehill recalls going out with her friend once restrictions had lifted in the U.K. and sensing how much had shifted. “It’s such a weird, un-put-into-words-able experience to watch someone you know for such a long time become globally famous,” she said. The fact that Coughlan didn’t find success straight out of school “has grounded her significantly, which means that she doesn’t let it go to her head.”
Success has not come without complications, however, like the relentless media scrutiny around Coughlan’s physical appearance. “It’s really hard and feels [like] s—,” she said.
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In 2018, she wrote an essay for the Guardian responding to a theater critic who described her character in a London production of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” as “an overweight little girl.” Coughlan is determined to push back against this kind of casual body-shaming because, she said, “I grew up at a time where it was so overt. There was the circle of shame for cellulite [in magazines] — just horrific, horrific messaging.”
Lydia West, left, and Nicola Coughlan in “Big Mood,” the Tubi dramedy created by Coughlan’s friend Camilla Whitehill.
(Chris Baker / Dancing Ledge Productions )
It’s also why this season of “Bridgerton,” which celebrates the allure of a character often overlooked as a wallflower, is so meaningful to Coughlan — and why she suspects it will resonate with so many viewers. Rhimes and showrunner Jess Brownell decided Season 3 should deviate from the timeline in Julia Quinn’s novels and focus on Penelope and Colin — a couple known to fans as “Polin.”
“We’ve watched Colin not quite understand that Penelope has a crush on him for two seasons. You can only play that dynamic out for so long before it gets frustrating,” said Brownell.
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Stepping into the lead meant Coughlan would need to be on set nearly every day for eight months straight. But if she was overwhelmed at first, she didn’t let on. “She just seemed so game and ready for anything on set,” said Brownell. “If anything, I just noticed how seriously she was taking her preparation.”
Coughlan was insightful and collaborative, said Brownell, sharing an endless stream of ideas about her character in a WhatsApp group chat with Newton and Brownell. She had suggestions for specific music cues and for Penelope’s makeover, which sees her ditching her tight red poodle curls and garish citrus-hued gowns for loose waves and cool blues and greens. Coughlan is also very plugged into the fandom, and she advocated for including a scene, important to novel readers, in which Penelope calls Colin “Mr. Bridgerton.”
As if that weren’t enough, she even found time to bake fresh Irish soda bread and bring it to set.
“It was really challenging. It was terrifying. It was cathartic. It was a million and one things,” say Nicola Coughlin of the new season of “Bridgerton.”
(Evelyn Freja / For The Times)
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This season is “a lot lighter and more playful than we’ve been able to be in the past,” Brownell added. The writing leans into Coughlan’s strengths as a comedic performer, particularly her knack for awkward banter, a skill she deploys as Penelope throws herself into the London social season in a bid to find a husband.
Coughlan, who enjoyed being, as she put it, “the weirdo in the background” for the first two seasons of “Bridgerton” and who idolizes women like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Kristen Wiig, said it was a thrill “to play Penelope as goofy and terrible with men.”
Like Coughlan, Newton was nervous about filming the love scenes but found the anxiety quickly dissipated after the first take. “We both had a similar outlook — it’s like doing comedy because you’re having to put yourself out there and feel exposed and risk something,” said Newton (who watched “Hamilton” at Coughlan’s recommendation and loved it, just as she predicted.) Because of how these moments focus on consent and emotional intimacy, “It was essential that we were friends,” he said.
The co-stars were especially heartened to hear from a burly security guard named Dave who has worked on “Bridgerton” since Season 1 and was moved by the romance he watched them act out on set.
“He came to Luke and I and said, ‘I don’t normally watch shows like this. Something about this season is very special, and I’m very proud of you,’” Coughlan recalled.
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For several weeks, Coughlan was filming “Bridgerton” and “Big Mood” at the same time. She coped with the stress by watching “Vanderpump Rules” from the beginning.
“It’s a testament to how nosy I am that I heard people talking about Scandoval, had no frame of reference and was like, ‘Well, I need to know,’” said Coughlan, now a superfan who recently threw a “Vanderpump”-themed housewarming party and made a beeline to take a selfie with Ariana Madix when she was at “SNL.” It’s not just escapism: She also finds creative inspiration in reality TV personalities, channeling some of Lala Kent’s mannerisms into her character in “Big Mood.” “You forget how f— weird people are, how bizarre they can be,” she said.
In January, Coughlan had not yet seen the new season of “Bridgerton.” But by phone in early May, she said she’d finally watched the episode in which Colin and Penelope sleep together, nervously, by herself in a hotel room. Once again, the anticipation was worse than the thing itself.
“I laughed and cried and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s amazing,’” she said. “They’re not titillating just to be titillating, even though we hope they are sexy. There’s so much about female pleasure and positive sexual experiences, and we don’t get enough of that onscreen.”
Coughlan has reached a bittersweet crossroads on “Bridgerton,” now that her character’s big season has wrapped and she will soon return to being “the weirdo in the background.” But she has no regrets.
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“We left it all on the pitch. There’s nothing I wanted to do this season that I didn’t get to do,” she said. “And that’s a rare thing.”
Pankaj Kapur in ‘Jab Khuli Kitaab’
| Photo Credit: ZEE5
Cracks in conjugality constitute a common conflict device in Hindi cinema. Usually, the male commits the bhool and expects forgiveness. Most fissures appear early, but what if a grandmother reveals a long-buried truth? Can the man accept it as easily as he expects forgiveness? Seasoned actor and theatre practitioner Saurabh Shukla gives new meaning to a prescribed book, making us both chuckle and reflect.
Being a cinematic adaptation of his play, the constraints of the medium are not completely erased, but it shines as a heartfelt exploration of love’s endurance.
The film’s core premise revolves around a decades-old secret — Anusuya’s (Dimple Kapadia) confession of an indiscretion early in their marriage — that surfaces after she awakens from a coma. This revelation forces Gopal (Pankaj Kapur) to re-examine 50 years of trust through the lens of this buried truth as a forgotten ad hoc presence in his life threatens to become a permanent peeve. Enter Negi (Aparshakti Khurana), a young client-chasing lawyer who becomes an unlikely facilitator of tough conversations, legal proceedings, and emotional confrontations.
Synopsis: Gopal and Anusuya’s decades-long marriage is shaken by a revelation.
Though the transgression is a distant memory, its emergence shatters Gopal’s sense of shared space with Anusuya. He questions whether the life he built was an illusion. The woman he cared for seems suddenly unfamiliar. The film asks questions that may seem flimsy but persist in memory. For instance, Anusuya’s love for poetry that Gopal never really discovers, or the concept of marzi (inclination) in relationships.
Meanwhile, the revelation shakes the family unit. The parents initially try to shield the children from the truth, but the tension inevitably seeps in. Initially, it seems the son and son-in-law are bitten by the Baghban bug, but as the film progresses, the writing provides space for a dialogue on how companionship extends beyond the couple.
The film quietly reflects on the role of memory in a marriage, treating it as a central force that both sustains and disrupts long-term bonds. Gopal’s growing dementia suddenly seems like a cure for his marital problem. Without underlining, Shukla also explores the impact of the revelation on Gopal’s social psyche. Suddenly, a seemingly progressive man starts behaving like a parochial uncle, as we find dozens of them around us these days. Is it always the personal that shapes the political socialisation? Another uncle reminds us that laughing too much leads to days of sorrow, as if the Almighty has assigned us a quota of happiness.
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A still from the film
| Photo Credit:
ZEE5
Kapur’s masterful control shines through in Gopal’s progression from bewilderment and stubborn pride to vulnerability and, eventually, the rediscovery of love. Over the years, Kapur has shone in the estuary of comedy that holds a tragedy in its fold. He lives the script’s shifting tones. From the tender caregiving scenes in the beginning to the profound internal shift in demeanour and body language toward the film’s resolution— the transformation feels earned and believable.
It is hard to believe Dimple as a wilting wife, but soon we realise it’s the gravitas in her voice and personality that makes Anusuya a believable picture of regret and resilience.
We know the coma is more like a metaphor, but the medical aspect is treated with a heavy hand. The plot unfolds in a somewhat linear and foreseeable way, with the revelation and its consequences following expected beats. The contrivances, the dot-to-dot mechanics of storytelling, surface in the second half as if the director is keen on arriving at the crux without peeling the layers properly. But it is the chemistry between Shukla and Kapur that prevents this bittersweet dramedy from becoming schmaltzy.
The movie is called “Heel” and its frenetic opening — a flash-cut glimpse of young, handsome, swaggeringly cruel Tommy (Anson Boon) in drug-fueled party mode — seems enough to explain the title. The next time we see him, though, he’s neck-shackled in the basement of a remote English estate. What follows in Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa’s blackly comic, unnerving thriller is clearly meant to evoke “Heel’s” more obedience-minded reading.
And who would be harshing this hooligan’s buzz with a case of reform-minded abduction? An eerily isolated, rules-driven nuclear family: mild-mannered, soft-spoken Chris (Stephen Graham), haunted Catherine (Andrea Riseborough) and polite son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen). They all may as well have sprung from the combined neo-gothic conjurings of Edward Gorey and Harold Pinter. Under Komasa’s direction, the mix of fractured fable and terroristic morality play in Bartek Bartosik’s screenplay is absurd but potent, giving “Heel” enough psychologically twisted juju to nearly always feel like more than the sum of its parts.
Our first glimpse of Tommy chained up, pleading to be let go, is through the eyes of a young Macedonian refugee, Katrina (Monika Frajczyk), being given a tour of the large countryside manor where she’s just been hired by Chris for twice-a-week housework. Katrina, like us, is rightly horrified but she’s in her own bind: undocumented, saved by Chris from the streets, with her signature on a confidentiality agreement and a deportation threat hanging over her. She’s hardly in a position to do much more than accept what’s going on as a grimmer version of her own dead-end predicament.
And yet what’s readily apparent is that this weird, fragile, insular family is genuinely keen on folding Tommy into their lives. They’re also convinced of their unorthodox methods, which hinge on reinforcement and reward. Tommy seems receptive, too, with each invitation to participate in his abductors’ togetherness (meals, movie nights, a picnic). This is when “Heel” is at its most alluringly queasy, a dark commentary on all families as institutions inherently built on confinement and emotional blackmail. (It’s no coincidence one of the movie’s executive producers is Jerzy Skolimowski, who made his own pointed kidnapping allegory with “Moonlighting.”)
Everyone’s broken, so the collective strength of the cast in keeping us on our toes about where this is all headed is a huge plus. The wiry Boon doles out his brash character’s reserves of vulnerability to stunning effect — Tommy is a difficult part and Boon knows how to make it revealing and suspenseful. Graham’s tweaked, sensitive patriarch is tantalizingly far from the heartbreaking dad of “Adolescence” and the gloriously oddball Riseborough makes the most of her faint-voiced mom’s severity. Frajczyk and Rakusen are also pitch-perfect.
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Last year Komasa had another family-centered thriller with “Anniversary,” a movie about politics corrupting a happy home. But we know that equation already. “Heel” is Tolstoy’s happy-family maxim cooked in a mad scientist’s lab. While it sometimes shows its seams as an idea movie, its elegant disturbia has a boldness, recalling that great mind-game ’60s era that gave us “TheServant,” “The Collector,” and the early psychological freak-outs of Komasa’s countryman, Roman Polanski.
In cinema logic, sharks, especially great whites, make excellent characters in animation. From Bruce in Finding Nemo to Mr Shark, the master of disguise in The Bad Guys, these apex predators turn their great gummy mouths with many pointy teeth into jolly good fellows.
In Hoppers, the 30th animation film from Pixar, there is a great white called Diane (Vanessa Bayer), who, despite being a scary assassin, has such sweet, shining eyes and a warm smile that one cannot help but grinning back.
Hoppers (English)
Director: Daniel Chong
Voice cast: Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, Jon Hamm, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco
Storyline: A fierce animal lover uses a new technology to converse with animals and save their habitat from greedy, self-serving humans
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Runtime: 104 minutes
We first meet Mabel (Piper Curda) as a little girl trying to set all the animals in school free and being sent home for her pains (and also because she bites one of the teachers trying to stop her). Her busy mother drops Mabel with her grandmother (Karen Huie) who shows her the peace and quiet that can be hers if she only stops to listen.
The glade where grandmother Tanaka teaches her this valuable life lesson becomes a special place for Mabel. Years later, after her grandmother has passed, 19-year-old Mabel is a college student and still fighting for animal rights.
Matters come to a head when the mayor of Beaverton, Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm) plans to blow up the glade to build a freeway. Mabel tries to get signatures from the citizenry to stop the freeway plans, but that comes to naught as people quickly turn away from the zealous Mabel.
Frustrated, with no recourse in sight, Mabel chances upon a beaver making its way to her university’s biology lab. First worried that her biology professor Sam (Kathy Najimy) is doing some unspeakable animal experiments, Mabel is nonplussed to find that Sam, with her colleague Nisha (Aparna Nancherla) and graduate student Conner (Sam Richardson), have developed a revolutionary technology to transfer human consciousness to robot animal.
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Mabel uploads her consciousness into a robot beaver and sets off to thwart the mayor. Seeing the world from the animals’ perspective gives Mabel a unique point of view. Hoppers has jokes, chases, largeness of heart and solid science — not consciousness-switching with robot animals or flying shark assassins but the fact that beavers are the environmental engineers of the natural world.
The voice cast is wonderful, from Bobby Moynihan as the beaver king, George to Dave Franco as Titus, the prickly butterfly who becomes the insect king after Mabel accidentally kills his mum — the Insect Queen, played with terrifying grandeur by Meryl Streep.
The animals are delightfully delineated, from the spaced-out beaver, Loaf (Eduardo Franco) to Ellen (Melissa Villaseñor) the grumpy bear. The animation is lovely, with each of the animal and human characteristics clearly outlined. From the mayor’s grasping to Sam’s brilliance, Mabel’s fervour to Loaf’s stillness, and the different animal monarchs’ regality, it is all given marvellous life.
ALSO READ: ‘The Bride!’ movie review: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s glam-goth Frankenstein can’t hold its stitches
The “pond rules” ensure that the animals are not completely anthropomorphised — a sticky point in animation films where carnivores and herbivores hang together without even a sneaky licking of lips!
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Smart, funny, exciting, honest, and touching, Hoppers is the kind of film you can watch with the bachcha party and elders alike, with a happy grin. And then there is Diane of the red, red lips and sparkly white rotating teeth — yes, Hoppers boasts that level of detailing.
