In a new interview with The Times, Coughlan explained why she didn’t want to be applauded for doing sex scenes that require showing skin.

“Don’t call me brave. I have a cracking pair of boobs. There’s nothing brave about that, that’s actually just me showing them off,” she said.

Coughlan then pointed out that she’s actually a few sizes smaller than the average size woman in the U.K., which is a size 16, so she has no idea why she’s being dubbed a “plus-size heroine.”

“I worked my arse off for that show. I barely saw my family and friends, and people were just going, ‘But your body …’”

Coughlan called the chatter around her body “reductive and “boring” even when people mean it as a compliment.

“What if I was suddenly going to play a ballerina and lose a ton of weight, are you not going to like me anymore? That’s insane and so insulting,” she declared.

During press for the show the 37-year-old told Stylist Magazine that she asked for certain lines and moments to be included during sex scenes.

“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 ‘f*** you’ to all the conversation surrounding my body; it was amazingly empowering.”

Coughlan has been begging people to stop discussing her body for years.

In 2021, she went on to X, formally known as Twitter, and said chatter about her body makes her “uncomfortable”.

“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,” she wrote.

She added that she was writing from the point of view of being an actor and not a body positivity activist.

“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,” she said.