As the steamy second half of Bridgerton’s third season nears, Nicola Coughlan is celebrating her record-breaking work on the hit Netflix series—and shutting down commentary about her body in the process.

During a recent post-screening Q&A in Dublin, a journalist said that Coughlan was “very brave” to bare her body onscreen for her role as Penelope Featherington. Without missing a beat, she replied, “You know, it is hard ’cause I think women with my body type, women with perfect breasts—we do not see ourselves onscreen enough,” which earned her laughs and cheers from the audience. “I am very proud as a member of the perfect-breasts community. I hope you enjoy seeing them.”

Coughlan leads this season of Bridgerton alongside Luke Newton, who plays Colin, Penelope’s lifelong friend who has become her betrothed following a sexy carriage ride that sent the internet into a frenzy. The next four episodes contain even more Regency-era trysts between the couple, which Coughlan played an integral role in mapping alongside her leading man and the show’s intimacy coordinator, Lizzy Talbot. “I specifically asked for certain lines and moments to be included,” she told Stylist magazine (via BuzzFeed). “There’s one scene where I’m very naked on camera, and that was my idea, my choice. It just felt like the biggest ‘fuck you’ to all the conversation surrounding my body; it was amazingly empowering.” Coughlan added that she “felt beautiful” during those scenes and wanted to be able to “look back on this and remember how fucking hot I looked.”

The actor, who got her start on the coming-of-age comedy Derry Girls, has long established that she’d rather the world not focus on her physical appearance. “If you have an opinion about my body please, please don’t share it with me,” she wrote on Instagram in 2022. “It’s really hard to take the weight of thousands of opinions on how you look being sent directly to you every day.” She later told the The Irish Times, “All I care about is the work. Bodies change—if I lose weight or gain weight or I do anything, it’s no one’s business. All I care about is doing good acting and being judged on that.”