Nicola Coughlan dishes on 'Bridgerton' season 2

It’s a big week for "Bridgerton" fans! The hit show returns Friday for season two with all the scandal 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 shared.

Additional perks of having a successful debut season is that "we know what this show is now," Coughlan said. "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: she was also the town gossip columnist Lady Whistledown. Now that the secret's out, "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," she said.

Getting back into character after so much time off wasn't an issue for Coughlan because "you feel immediately different" putting on those clothes on set, she said.

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 said. "But mostly there is a hand double."