Bridgerton star Nicola Coughlan has begged fans to stop commenting on her looks.
The Galway native admitted she finds it “hard to take the weight of thousands of opinions on how you look”.
The 35-year-old – who has 1.2M fans on Instagram - pleaded with fans to keep their opinions to themselves about her body as she revealed she gets thousands of messages commenting on her body are "sent directly" to her every day.
Alongside a mirror selfie, the Derry Girls star wrote: “Hello! So just a thing- if you have an opinion about my body please, please don't share it with me.
“Most people are being nice and not trying to be offensive but I am just one real life human being and it's really hard to take the weight of thousands of opinions on how you look being sent directly to you every day.
“If you have an opinion about me that's ok, I understand I'm on TV and that people will have things to think and say but I beg you not to send it to me directly.
“Anyways here's a pic of me in my hotel in NY about to go to SNL, it's unrelated to this post but delighted with my hair in it.”
Nicola previously spoke about how uncomfortable she gets when people talk about her body shape, saying “every time I'm asked about my body in an interview it makes me deeply uncomfortable”.
In a series of tweets, she wrote: “Can we please stop asking women about their weight in interviews, especially when it completely irrelevant.
“I'm seeing a lot of interviews from 10 years ago where people go ‘Oh weren't the questions so inappropriate!’ unfortunately it's still happening.
“Every time I'm asked about my body in an interview it makes me deeply uncomfortable and so sad I'm not just allowed to just talk about the job I do that I so love.”
It's so reductive to women when we're making great strides for diversity in the arts, but questions like that just pull us backwards.'
The actress explained she is “not a body positivity activist” and said her image is not something she defines herself by.
She added: “Also, and I mean this in the nicest way as possible, I'm not a body positivity activist, I'm an actor I would lose or gain weight if an important role requirement.
“My body is the tool I use to tell stories, not what I define myself by. So yeah, it's 2021 it would be nice if we didn’t have to keep having this conversation.”
In 2018, Nicola penned a comment piece for The Guardian, detailing the pain of being described as “a fat girl” and “overweight little girl” by a theatre critic in recent years.
She wrote: “I'm very lucky to get to use my body to become all these fascinating women. But the prism through which my body is viewed is inescapable.
“I know I'm not alone; women in my industry are put under constant scrutiny for their looks. It affects male actors as well – I had messages from them – but the vast majority of feedback was from women.
“Something in our society tells us that women's bodies are fair game for scrutiny in a way that men's simply are not.”
