Bridgerton’s Nicola Coughlan, Luke Newton Lounged Naked Between Scenes

It’s true, Nicola Coughlan and costar Luke Newton lounged naked together between filming scenes in Bridgerton.

“Yeah, so it’s really funny,” Coughlan, 37, told Teen Vogue in an interview published on Wednesday, April 24. “That is true. It is a testament to the fact that we just got to a point where we were so comfortable together. We’d just finished the big sex scene, the most intense and involved one…. and we just felt relieved.”

While it may have been a surprising choice to stay put, Coughlan noted that the pair weren’t wearing “real clothes” so if they had gotten up between scenes they would have bared it all to the crew.

Coughlan previously gushed that Newton, 31, made her feel “really taken care of” during their intimate scenes.

“We really had each other’s backs and also then we could just have a laugh about it like, the way that we just, like, lying under a blanket being like, ‘I should chill now,’” Coughlan told AP Entertainment in a February interview shared via TikTok, to which Newton added, “Yeah, halfway through the day you just relax and you’re like, ‘I don’t really care if I’m naked.’”

Coughlan recalled, “They were like, ‘Do you want to get up?’ We were like, ‘No, no, I’m fine. I’m comfy.’”

Coughlan also noted that those scenes are “a really important part of the story.” She said, “Like, those scenes in this show are important, they’re an important part of the narrative, they’re not throw away. So they’re not short scenes, they’re important.”

Season 3 of Bridgerton is set to revolve around Penelope Featherington (Coughlan) and Colin Bridgerton (Newton). As for why the show chose to focus on Penelope and Colin as the central characters in season 3, showrunner Jess Brownell said she felt like it was their “time” after season 1 followed Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor) and Simon Basset (Regé-Jean Page) and season 2 followed Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) and Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley).

“We’ve been watching both of these actors on our screens since Season 1, we’ve already invested in them a little bit. We know who they are as people,” she told Variety in May 2022. “I feel like, especially in the last season, there are these moments of tension between them where it’s like, Colin walks up to the line of almost realizing that Penelope has feelings for him but doesn’t quite get there. Instead of treading water on that dynamic, we wanted to push it into their season. It really felt like the perfect moment to tee it up.”

The first half of Bridgerton season 3 premieres on Netflix on Thursday, May 16, while the remaining episodes drop on Thursday, June 13.