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Angourie Rice: Inside The Career Of Australia’s Quiet Achiever
She may be having a breakthrough moment in Hollywood, but she’s been here all along.

This is a compliment: until recently, if you passed Angourie Rice in the street, your first thought was more likely to be, There goes another totally regular Melbourne girl than There goes an actor who’s worked with Sofia Coppola, Kate Winslet, Tina Fey, Jennifer Garner, Ryan Gosling, Elle Fanning, Miley Cyrus, Russell Crowe, Margaret Qualley, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Nicole Kidman, Rebel Wilson, Sarah Snook …

It’s not that Rice doesn’t exude It factor — that elusive energy as invisible as an aura but felt by all who come within its radius. It’s something else that’s hard to put your finger on. Within the first half an hour of being in her presence, it hits you: she’s normal. She’s sweet; she’s punctual (she’ll already be on Zoom when you log in early trying to beat her there); she’s a late-night baker; she reads (a lot); and she’s close with her sister and parents. She was probably a pleasure to have in class. She just happens to love acting, as do a lot of famous people. She also happens to be really good at it, as are a lot of famous people. The difference is Rice hasn’t made ‘Hollywood star’ her personality — or even a defining factor of it.

Like Greta Lee and Kathryn Hahn before her, Rice is having a breakthrough Hollywood moment, despite having been in so many things. Her role as Cady Heron in this year’s Mean Girls has shot her into the stratosphere, but she didn’t come out of nowhere. Rice has been working with A-listers since she was 13 and played Ryan Gosling’s daughter in the buddy action comedy The Nice Guys, which also stars Russell Crowe and Margaret Qualley.

But Rice was acting well before then. She first caught the Australian film industry’s attention in 2012 as an 11-year-old in the short film Transmission, for which she won Best Actress at St Kilda Film Festival. At 12, she made her feature film debut in These Final Hours with fellow newcomer Sarah Snook.

To make the leap into Hollywood, Rice sent an audition tape into the ether, and was flown to Los Angeles for the next round. She puts the whole thing down to “luck”: the script for The Nice Guys had been floating around for 20 years, waiting for funding and the right actors. “They happened to make it when I was the exact right age,” Rice says. “I was in the right place at the right time.”

Everything hinged on that movie. “It had to be a good experience because otherwise I wouldn’t have continued acting,” she says. Not to mention it had to be worth missing out on the Katy Perry concert she and her sister had tickets for. She laughs at the memory of such a typical display of misguided teen emotion: you land a Hollywood movie, but you have to give up so much for it. “I was really sad to miss it,” she says. “We had gotten VIP tickets for our birthdays, and then I got the movie. I don’t buy concert tickets anymore because you just don’t know if you’re going to be there for it.”

It was clearly worth it, because not only has she kept acting, but it also showed her a path forward: that it’s possible to work with people who lead with kindness and with whom respect flows in both directions. “It showed me that even at such a high level, they can make it a really good working environment, especially for a young person,” she says.

That’s something she’s continued to seek. In 2017, she appeared in Sofia Coppola’s psychological thriller, The Beguiled. Rice plays Jane, a student at a girls’ school run by Nicole Kidman’s Miss Martha and also starring Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning and Colin Farrell. Rice has spoken about how Coppola “commands the set with kindness and never raises her voice”. She’s spoken similarly highly of working with Tina Fey on Mean Girls, describing her as “very soft-spoken. … It’s this power that is very kind and not demanding or domineering.” And likewise of Kate Winslet, who plays Mare, the mother to Rice’s Siobhan in the series Mare of Easttown. At one point, Rice has an intimate scene in the back of a car, and despite being wrapped for the day, Winslet hopped into the boot as a spontaneous intimacy coach.

“I learnt so much from watching these women. They wouldn’t have the career longevity they’ve had if they weren’t dedicated to leadership in a way that isn’t forceful or arrogant or mean,” Rice says. “I feel like it’s harder to be awful to someone than it is to be polite.”

This would be a good place to segue into Mean Girls, in which she reprises Lindsay Lohan’s seminal character from the 2004 original. That story, however, begins with Fey cold emailing Rice with the script, which begs the question: How did Tina Fey have her email address?

To jump back, between 2017 and 2021, beginning the same year she appeared in The Beguiled, Rice was in three Spider-Man movies as Betty, classmate to Tom Holland’s Peter Parker and Zendaya’s MJ. In that same period, she won the Best Lead Actress AACTA for her role as new girl Lisa in Ladies in Black, set in Sydney’s Goode’s department store in the 1959 Christmas season. She also appeared alongside Miley Cyrus in a 2019 episode of Black Mirror, and then came Mare of Easttown in 2021. In 2022, she and Jennifer Garner starred in the series The Last Thing He Told Me as stepmother and daughter searching for their missing father and husband. That same year, she played the younger, pre-coma version of Rebel Wilson’s cheer captain in Senior Year.

All of which is to say, Tina Fey had seen Angourie Rice around. So when that email came in late 2022, it was a surprise, but not a shock. “I was really flattered that Tina thought I would fit into the role,” Rice says. “It’s so iconic.”

And yet after filming wrapped and she came home to perform in Melbourne Theatre Company’s My Sister Jill — so after she played the lead in one of the biggest movies of the year — Rice felt like a fraud. “Everyone in the cast went to acting school, but I never did,” she says. “I get in my head about it — that I haven’t trained and I should have.” But surely training would have been redundant? Rice’s father, Jeremy, is a theatre director and producer, and her mother, Kate, is an award-winning playwright. Rice has been watching theatre her whole life. Isn’t osmosis a form of learning? Still, impostor syndrome comes for us all.

Rice is careful not to put all her self-worth eggs in the acting basket. “You can’t put 100 per cent of yourself into one thing, especially one thing that is so out of your control,” she says. “It’s so much better for me to have other interests.” Those include a book co-authored with her mum called Stuck Up & Stupid, a retelling of Pride & Prejudice; and a podcast called The Community Library in which she critically analyses all forms of storytelling, from Shakespeare to pop songs.

Rice has no intention of moving to LA, preferring instead to travel when required. “It’s really easy to get swept up in everything overseas,” she says. “It’s a credit to my family [that] home is a really important feeling for me, and it’s a balance I really want to preserve.” See, normal.

Source: elle.com.au

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