Nicola Coughlan Sequin Long-Sleeve Dress Black Velvet Bow Hand on Hip Smiling 'Bridgerton' Premiere After-Party

Nicola Coughlan wasn’t about to leave any crumbs (or clothes on, for that matter) when it came to her performance in Bridgerton season 3. After getting candid about how she requested to be “very naked” during the show’s steamy scenes, the actress is explaining the reasoning behind her choice. And no, it wasn’t to shut down the body-shamers—she actually did it for herself, thank you very much.

“We had a lot of control and we chose how naked we were,” Coughlan said during a video interview with The Skimm. “People said, you know, she did it to show the body-shamers. But I didn’t. I did it completely selfishly. I did it because I wanted to do it, and there’s something incredibly empowering in that.”

Nicola Coughlan White Peplum Dress Opera Gloves Posing at 'Bridgerton' Premiere

In a previous interview with the Stylist, Coughlan said that stripping down in an upcoming sex scene in part two of the season (which hits Netflix on June 13) was “amazingly empowering.”

“There’s one scene where I’m very naked on camera, and that was my idea, my choice,” she said. “It just felt like the biggest ‘fuck you’ to all the conversation surrounding my body; it was amazingly empowering.”

She added, “I felt beautiful in the moment, and I thought: ‘When I’m 80, I want to look back on this and remember how fucking hot I looked!'”

Nicola Coughlan White Dress Looking Up at Luke Newton 'Bridgerton' Premiere

In fact, she said filming the steamy scenes with her co-star, Luke Newton, became her favorite part of this season, adding that it was very “liberating.”

“The sex scenes are revealing in many senses, but strangely they became one of my favorite parts about filming this season,” she told Marie Claire Australia. “It ended up being quite powerful and quite liberating. Luke and I are really good partners and we had a lot of trust in one another. I would have struggled to do it with someone else, because we could talk about it and text about it and we had a lot of say in how those scenes were done.”

The real-life friends had so much fun filming that they even broke a piece of furniture on set. “Yeah, hell yeah we did,” she told 7News Australia, adding that they “could have a laugh about it.”

“It felt like a really safe space,” Newton confirmed. “There were moments where we could explore the scene and try it different ways and that ended up in a piece of furniture getting broken.”