Nicola Coughlan

At the age of 10, in 1997, Nicola Coughlan had an uncredited role in action thriller film My Brother’s War.[7] In 2004, she started her career with a role in Tom Collins’ short film, The Phantom Cnut, a revenge comedy.[2][7] In the following years, she did various voice works in animated series.[7] At some point, due to financial difficulties, Coughlan had to go back to Ireland. She was suffering from depression during this period and her family helped her through the entire process.[3][8] She worked part-time at an optician in Galway. She responded to an open casting call for Jess and Joe Forever at The Old Vic in London and won the main role of Jess. The first performance was in September 2016 prior to a national tour.[3][9]

In 2018, Coughlan began playing Clare Devlin, one of the main characters, in Derry Girls. This sitcom is set in Derry, Northern Ireland, in the 1990s.[10][11] The series was broadcast in January and February 2018 on Channel 4. But it was after its rerelease onto streaming platform Netflix in December of the same year that the show gained an international audience and an instant popularity.[7]

In the same year, she also played Hannah Dalton in Harlots. The period drama television series is set in 18th-century London. 2018 marked her West End debut in The Donmar Warehouse's production of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Evening Standard named her as "one of the Rising Stars of 2018".[12] The same year, she competed against some of her Derry Girls co-stars in an episode of The Great British Bake Off show.[13]

In 2019, it was announced that Coughlan had been cast in the Netflix series Bridgerton, which premiered in December 2020.[14] In this period-drama series based on the best-selling Julia Quinn book series of the same name, Coughlan played Penelope Featherington. The girl is a reluctant debutante and youngest daughter of a nouveau-riche family in Regency-era London.[7][15]