Nicola Coughlan's Mom Was 'So Mad' About Steamy Bridgerton Scenes, 'As If They Were My Fault'

While on The Graham Norton Show, the 37-year-old actress opened up about the role, which she described as her first time playing an actual adult.

"It was weird having to then play the romantic lead," she said of playing Penelope Bridgerton on Season 3 of the hit Netflix series. "It's a sexy show. A lot of sexy things happen in it, and then I realized I was going to have to do the sexy things."

And while many viewers and the internet alike were here for those sexy scenes opposite co-star Luke Newton, her mom wasn't exactly loving it.

"My mother was so mad at me about those scenes -- as if they were my fault, so I didn't go to the screening with her," she recalled via the London Evening Standard.

Coughlan, meanwhile, has been open about the vulnerability in those scenes, revealing earlier this year that she personally requested to film one specific "very naked" scene as a response to body shaming that she's experienced online.

"There's one scene where I'm very naked on camera, and that was my idea, my choice," she said in a May interview with Stylist. "It just felt like the biggest 'f--k you' to all the conversation surrounding my body; it was amazingly empowering."

Coughlan continued, "I felt beautiful in the moment, and I thought: 'When I'm 80, I want to look back on this and remember how f--king hot I looked!'"

She does have one stipulation in her contract, however, when it comes to those Regency-era love scenes -- that she gets a PG-rated cut for her parents to watch.

"It's literally written into my contract. People think I'm saying it as a joke," she said during an appearance on SiriusXM Hits 1. "I just don't want to … We grew up Irish Catholic. That's just not how we vibe."