It’s a big week for Bridgerton fans! The hit Netflix show returns Friday for season two, with all the scandal and sexiness we’ve come to expect from the period drama.

After a successful season one, some might worry about a sophomore slump, but not this cast. Nicola Coughlan, who plays Penelope Featherington on the show, tells ABC Audio that everyone was “so excited just to be back at work.”

“We hadn’t gotten to celebrate in person the success the show had been. So to be back at work…We were all just like, ‘Oh, this is great,'” she explains. 

Additional perks of having a successful debut season is that “we know what this show is now,” Coughlan says. “We know what to expect and we know what to give to our audience. So even though it maybe should have been intimidating, we were all just more excited.”

At the end of season one, it was revealed that Coughlan’s character was living a double life, and she was also the town gossip columnist Lady Whistledown. Now that the secret’s out, she says “it was fun to get to play the Whistledown side of her and the conniving side of her and the businesswoman side of her. I just think she’s sort of a ball of contradictions.”

As for getting back into character after so much time off, that wasn’t an issue at all, because once you put on those clothes and step on those sets “you feel immediately different,” the actress shares. 

Coughlan also picked up a new skill: calligraphy. 

“I had to learn calligraphy, I had to learn how to write with a quill because it needed to look convincingly like I was writing at certain points,” she shares. “But mostly there is a hand double.”