“How bad are you at your job, if ‘fat’ is the only descriptive term that you can f*cking muster?”
Nicola Coughlan has recounted the time she was body shamed by the same theatre reviewer – twice.
The Derry Girls actor was starring in two separate plays when one reviewer decided to mention her weight while critiquing her acting.
Coughlan said that she was “so pissed off” when she realised that the same person had unnecessarily mentioned her weight when reviewing her work – an aspect that hadn’t been mentioned in either of the plays’ scripts.
“The only thing he said about my character is ‘Joyce Emily is the kind of overweight girl who will always be subject to ridicule by her classmates,'” she told BBC podcast Duvet Days.
“There’s no point in that where the weight of the character is referenced, it was not in the casting brief that I received, it’s not in the text of the actual play.
“I read that review and I thought, ‘are you f*cking serious?” I take my job so seriously, I worked so hard. And if you didn’t like my acting, if you think my acting was crap, you can say that.
“If you think my accent was rubbish, say that. But to say ‘she’s bullied because she’s overweight?’ No. You just fundamentally got that wrong.”
Coughlan said that the second time she read a similar review by the same writer, she decided to tweet him about it.
The actor accused the man of reviewing her body and not her work. The reviewer said that he was “aghast” to have caused offence.
“When I realised it was the same guy, I was f*cking raging. I thought ‘how dare you?’ and ‘how bad are you at your job, if ‘fat’ is the only descriptive term that you can f*cking muster?'”
Tell him, girl.
Derry Girls will be available to watch on Netflix this month.
