Nicola Coughlan Auditioned To Play Robin In Stranger Things Season 3

As Penelope Featherington in Bridgerton, Nicola Coughlan has been a major part of one of Netflix’s biggest and most popular original series ever.

However, the Derry Girls star has revealed that she almost appeared in another of the streaming giant’s most iconic shows.

During a recent interview on the Capital breakfast show, the Bafta nominee was asked if there’d been any near-miss roles earlier in her career, before opening up about auditioning for Stranger Things in the lead-up to its third season.

“It would be generous to myself to say I narrowly missed out on it,” she claimed. “But I did a first-round audition for Stranger Things.”

Nicola then shared that the audition was “to play Robin”, the character eventually brought to life on screen by Maya Hawke in what proved to be her break-out role.

“You know when you watch a show and you go, ‘oh well, thank God I didn’t get that, because I would have been way worse!’,” she joked.

The Irish performer quickly added: “I don’t think I was anywhere close to being in Stranger Things, but I did audition.”

Since rising to fame as a cast member in Derry Girls, Nicola’s screen work has included a minor role in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and a leading performance in the dark comedy Big Mood.

Big Mood will return for a second season on Channel 4 next month, with the inaugural run earning Nicola her first TV Bafta nomination in the Best Female Performance In A Comedy category last year.

Nicola also recently lent her voice to the animated sports comedy Goat, made a scene-stealing appearance in the 2024 Doctor Who Christmas special and plays Silky in the star-studded new adaptation of Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree, alongside the likes of Claire Foy, Andrew Garfield, Rebecca Ferguson and Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning.