Angourie attended the Vanity Fair And Instagram Present Vanities A Night for Young Hollywood on February 26th. Click on the gallery link below to see all new photos.
Angourie attended the The Grinning Man Australian Premiere yesterday. Click on the gallery link below to see all new photos.
Meet Angourie Rice: Rising Hollywood star, published writer, podcaster – and just 23
She was acting alongside Ryan Gosling and Nicole Kidman while her school friends were working at Kmart. At 23, Melburnian Angourie Rice is scaling the Hollywood hills – while keeping her feet firmly on the ground.
By Brodie Lancaster
Angourie Rice: “I was taught – or I learnt – early on that you have to do acting because you love it.”
This story is a part of the April 27 edition of Good Weekend.
Three metres above my head, one of Australia’s brightest young actors is heaving herself up a wall. This rock-climbing gym is where students, dreadlocked contortionists and, today, a Hollywood star, get together to chalk their hands and ascend, soundtracked by an endless playlist of forgotten mid-00s indie rock. It’s in the last remaining industrial pocket of Collingwood, the Melbourne suburb otherwise overtaken by breweries, cafes and concept stores, and Angourie Rice’s biceps are quivering with effort.
“I didn’t like it at first, because I don’t like to be bad at things,” the 23-year-old actor tells me between sends – the word for a successful route up the wall, a blend of mental problem-solving and physical strength that involves gripping the technicolour blobs buttressing the walls of the hangar-sized gym.
Her younger sister, a diminutive 20-year-old athlete named Kalliope, has been bouldering for a few years. More social than a standard gym session, climbing is a companion to her work teaching gymnastics to kids and training as a stunt actor. Earlier this year, she convinced Angourie, fresh from her press commitments as the star of the all-singing-some-dancing adaptation of teen classic Mean Girls, to join her at the artificial rock face. It took a couple of months of weekly climbing dates before the actor found the joy in falling before reaching the top. “I want to be good at things straight away.”
And she has been. She was just 11 when she shot her first film, the 2013 end-of-days drama These Final Hours. Within a few years, she was playing Ryan Gosling’s precocious daughter in the buddy spy comedy The Nice Guys. Then came the role of Betty Brant in Marvel’s latest Spider-Man trilogy; the cloistered and claustrophobic period world of indie auteur Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled alongside Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell; and her AACTA Award-winning role in Bruce Beresford’s 2018 Ladies in Black, based on a 1993 novel by Madeleine St John. All this before graduating high school.
“I put a lot of pressure on myself to do everything well,” Rice says, when we meet on a blustery March afternoon at Napier Quarter. Rice rode her bike to the European-influenced Fitzroy cafe from her nearby apartment, which she moved into last winter.
Rice wall-climbing in Collingwood. “I didn’t like it at first,” she says, “because I don’t like to be bad at things.”
She was a high achiever at her Carlton North school and remains studious and structured. Her grey-blue eyes light up while talking about her colour-coded Google calendar, and the graphs and pie charts she makes to track the books she finishes each year. “I think Capricorns are typically people who love spreadsheets,” she says, laughing. “I set challenges for myself in terms of reading. Every year I like to see the stats of how many translated books [I’ve read], what the genres were; I track all of that. I just find it so fun. Also, it’s a good way to get control out of your system. There are so many things in my life I can’t control, but this is one that I can.”
During lockdown, to-do lists became her daily baseline, and she instructed her family to dress up for “formal Friday” every week. She recognises it might not be all totally healthy. “There are lots of articles now about why idleness is good, and why it’s good to sit with your own thoughts, which I’m working towards. It’s hard.”
To be a bankable, bookable actor today requires a tightrope walk between the ability to disappear into any role and being a drawcard with a specific, established personality. Perhaps with a side project selling homewares or skincare, a famous parent – or maybe a music career with an existing army of fans who’ll prop up the box office. Actors can be defined years or decades later by one role they played early in their career, or forgotten in a flash, the future subject of a “Where are they now?” story.
Rice is unusual in that she’s both young yet quietly established, with a chameleonic ability to flit between epic superhero stories and gritty dramas, securing top billing in both teen musicals and prestige series. But there’s something that unites her characters, too, no matter how fully she disappears into each one: a bookishness that’s become something of a calling card.
A voracious reader, five years ago she launched a podcast called The Community Library, an outlet for discussing the intricacies of storytelling. Last year she and her mother published a novel for young adult readers, Stuck Up & Stupid, a modern take on Jane Austen (more about that later), which they’ll discuss on stage at next month’s Sydney Writers’ Festival.
You believe her, then, as the co-host of young Peter Parker’s school news reporter and a fellow intern at The Daily Bugle. Or as a 13-year-old in The Nice Guys kindly correcting a porn star’s syntax. In Honor Society, she plays the lead, a tightly wound type-A high-schooler who’s more than a little Tracy Flick, and who connects with a boy over a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale. As her classmates in the US Civil War-set The Beguiled go soft at the sight of a man in their midst, Jane – Rice’s Southern belle in training – considers the political threat of hiding the Union soldier.
Rice tracks the books she reads each year with graphs and pie charts, including how many translated novels she’s devoured. “Capricorns are typically people who love spreadsheets,” she says with a laugh.
Rice tracks the books she reads each year with graphs and pie charts, including how many translated novels she’s devoured. “Capricorns are typically people who love spreadsheets,” she says with a laugh.Credit: Kristoffer Paulsen
When casting Lisa, the emotional and narrative heart of Ladies in Black, Bruce Beresford was searching for an actor who captured the character’s progressive, naive but strong-willed spirit. “She had to be what Angourie is: a smart, bright, charming young girl,” the director says. “She’s a quick study, and a very accomplished actor with that skill of being absolutely word perfect from one end to the other of the script, but she has that charming quality of making it all seem so spontaneous.”
Rice’s characters think and worry, they plot and prepare. She breaks into a wide grin easily and often, her eyes crinkling at the edges, but the cogs are always turning. Ladies in Black’s Lisa reads Anna Karenina on her lunch breaks. When she declares at a dinner party that, newly accepted to the University of Sydney, “I’m going to be an actress or a poet or a novelist. Or maybe all three!” you could remove the period costume and make-up and believe it was Rice delivering the line as herself.
Kate Rice was producing a season of plays in Darwin when her oldest daughter’s talent for dialogue became clear to her and husband Jeremy, a theatre director. One of the shows was “very inappropriate for children”, the playwright and author remembers. How much could their four-year-old daughter, who spent her days playing in the rehearsal room corner, really be noticing? Turns out, quite a bit. “I saw her in the bath with her Barbie dolls acting out the whole scene, word for word,” Kate recalls. “She got all the voices and did it all the exact way we’d done it in rehearsal as well.”
From Darwin, the Rices moved to Perth, where These Final Hours would film some years later. They spent time in Germany next, before landing in Carlton upon their eventual move to Melbourne when Angourie was 11. The sisters grew up listening to their mum plotting dialogue, and would return home from school to find actors rehearsing in their living room. That theatrical upbringing equipped Rice with a keen sense of reality about the industry she was already entering.
“I think my mum was quite wary, because she knew how much rejection it involves and how much it could hurt,” she says. “She had a healthy sense of protection, but I also think that was good for me because I was taught – or I learnt – early on that you have to do it because you love it, not because you want success. And that the rejection is going to be really hard.”
For her part, Kate had a clear line in the sand: “The main thing for me always was, and it continues to be, to make sure she doesn’t attach her self-worth to getting a job or having a job or pleasing a director or pleasing a producer.”
Now that acting is Rice’s profession, rejection stings more than it did when it was her after-school job. What affected her more back then was the powerful shifts in her teen friends’ whims and moods, particularly when she returned to the reality of uniforms and recess after stints on film sets. “What does Ferris Bueller say? He’s like, ‘Life moves pretty fast.’ It was like that. You go away and high-school politics move very fast. You could be sick for a week with a cold and come back and things would be different. So leaving for months at a time changed a lot. That was the hardest thing about [working]: feeling friendships sort of move on without me. And feeling like I was floating a little bit. That was hard to deal with.”
At one stage she wanted a job at McDonald’s or Kmart like her school friends. Her parents reminded her that she was working, too, even if it didn’t involve a uniform or cash register. “There definitely was that feeling of, ‘I just want to be normal.’ ”
Rice graduated from her local high school, Princes Hill Secondary College, in 2018, and was accepted into a bachelor of arts course at the University of Melbourne. There was a plan to defer for a year, but by the time her cohort were heading to O-Week she was in Philadelphia on the set of HBO’s Mare of Easttown. “I couldn’t defer again and I couldn’t go to uni [because of filming commitments], so I lost my place. Since then I’ve just kept working.”
Each week, Rice and two of her close friends get together to play the tabletop strategy game Catan. After their bouldering meet-up, as she and her sister change out of their climbing shoes, Rice explains that she hasn’t won any of the previous three Catan games, and is banking on tonight. “You’re such a nerd,” Kalliope teases her sister.
Wise beyond her years. Old soul. Rice has undoubtedly heard them all – or had them all applied to her by journalists like me in profiles such as this, from the time she began appearing in films. When asked to describe Rice during the Mean Girls press junket, her pop singer co-star Renée Rapp deemed her “a tiny little, cute little grandma”.
She knits. She reads the classics. She takes a teddy bear with her when she travels for work. She gets her bearings about the places she works by perusing Atlas Obscura, the online home of “unusual and obscure travel destinations”, for sights to see. “They always have weird, artistic things to do in the city.” It sent her to a mosaic garden and a long-dead art collector’s personal museum in Philadelphia, where she filmed Mare, and in Vancouver, where she filmed Honor Society, to the city’s famous steam-powered clock.
She takes books with her, too, of course, and each one gets psychically linked to the job at hand, which is why the post-pandemic novel Station Eleven reminds her of shooting Mean Girls. “New Jersey in the winter – there was sometimes snow, but often it was just cold and bare trees and these adorable little houses. It was quite quiet. So that atmosphere is very related to the book for me now, which is kind of weird.”
Rice preps for her roles with the same intense commitment she applies to her
spectacularly regimented hobbies. If you were to flip through her Mean Girls script, you’d find layers of annotations. “I don’t really know what I’m looking for at the start and then I find it at the end,” she says of the process.
To play a younger version of Rebel Wilson in Senior Year, she studied videos of the actor to emulate “her particular style of comedy”. She journalled as the creative but grief-stricken teen Siobhan Sheehan for Mare of Easttown – and spent time nailing the local Philadelphia accent to be believable as Kate Winslet’s dorder. “For The Beguiled, all the girls did prep together … we had etiquette lessons, dancing lessons and dialect lessons.″
“I do think that women in the industry have learnt to do their jobs in a way that doesn’t ruffle feathers,” says Rice.
“I do think that women in the industry have learnt to do their jobs in a way that doesn’t ruffle feathers,” says Rice.Credit: Kristoffer Paulsen
The Beguiled was Sofia Coppola’s reimagining of the 1971 film (itself an adaptation of a 1966 novel), only this time told from the perspective of the women in the story. A famously thoughtful and soft-spoken director, Coppola highlighted, to Rice, the impressive control women directors can wield – and the immense restraint they’re required to keep over their emotions. “When I think about the way that [the female directors I’ve worked with] command sets with so much grace and kindness … I think that’s because of who they are, but I also think it’s because there’s this knowledge that if a woman loses it, she will not recover,” Rice says. “If she loses her temper or screams at someone or has a tantrum, she will never work again. And that, I think, historically, is not the same for men in positions of power, whether they’re producers or directors or actors.
“So I do think that women in the industry have learnt to do their jobs in a way that doesn’t ruffle feathers … there is something that’s unfortunate in
that sort of people-pleasing, not wanting to disrupt or upset people.”
Working on The Last Thing He Told Me – the 2023 Apple TV+ series adapted from Laura Dave’s bestselling novel – impressed upon Rice the close bonds that form on the sets of Hello Sunshine shows. The production company helmed by Reese Witherspoon is best-known for spotting, acquiring the rights to and adapting books by and about women for the big screen. Wild, Gone Girl and Where the Crawdads Sing were box-office successes, and its TV series have been equally well received. Rice missed out on roles in Hello Sunshine productions Big Little Lies and Little Fires Everywhere. “I auditioned twice for both of them. I just really wanted to work with her company.”
She got her shot on The Last Thing He Told Me, playing Jennifer Garner’s stepdaughter in the thriller TV series, which was recently renewed for a second season. “You know that fear of when you look up to someone and something they’ve created and you finally get to see that up close, there’s that fear that it will disappoint? It didn’t at all. The Hello Sunshine ethos is elevating women and women’s stories, and I saw that in the crew.”
Actor Dakota Johnson’s book club is called TeaTime Book Club. Singer Dua Lipa’s is a series on her content platform, Service95. Model Kaia Gerber’s is called Library Science. Actor Emma Roberts expanded her book club, Belletrist, into a production company that is “focused on, but not limited to, literary adaptations”.
Where Oprah’s Book Club – in the late 1990s and 2000s – plucked novels out of obscurity and put them in the hands of millions of women the world over, the modern, celebrity-supported, internet-first versions serve as opportunities to rebrand young, famous women, showcase their highbrow tastes, and give them something new to talk about in interviews. (For “nepo babies”, as we now label children of celebrities – which Johnson, Gerber and Roberts all are – this must be a welcome change.)
Rice and fellow actor Amy Keum playing over-achieving students in 2022’s Honor Society.
The Community Library, Rice’s podcast and companion Instagram account, might appear to be the latest in a long line of book clubs by famous young women. But she started it during her version of a gap year, which is also when she enrolled in a 10-week creative writing course at Melbourne’s RMIT University, intent on nurturing her literary ambitions. And listening to a handful of episodes of the podcast, it’s clear her intentions are far from personal branding. It’s less about trends or new releases or reviews, and more a platform for Rice to share essays linking themes and storytelling patterns in classic stories, noir tales set against the lonely backdrop of Los Angeles, and the lyrical world of Taylor Swift. In her most-listened-to episode, she analyses the trend of “Sad Hot Girl” books and declares them frustrating. Their protagonists, she says, are often inactive, choosing to say and think instead of do much of anything.
“So much in acting is collaborative, but that first decision of if they’re going to cast you is completely out of your hands, and that’s really hard to deal with,” Rice says. “So [the podcast] was a creative project that I just wanted to have complete control over.” The books to which she’s assigned a full five stars include Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Rennie Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.
Woolf came up early in our conversation; as Rice took off her helmet and secured her bike outside Napier Quarter, I was a few chapters into The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s novel about three women linked by their connections to Mrs Dalloway. “I don’t know how literary critics would feel about this, but I feel like you could argue that Mrs Dalloway is a sad hot girl,” Rice says. “Even though she’s not young; she’s disillusioned about her life and she’s going through this reminiscing and throwing parties and not really being present. So there have always been sad hot girls.”
Rice as Betty Brant in 2019’s Spider-Man: Far from Home, with fellow actors Jacob Batalon and Zendaya.
If Angourie Rice’s life was a film, the moment she first encountered the work of Jane Austen at age 12 would be a signpost in the first act, foreshadowing the moment it all came full circle in her early 20s. “Every evening we would sit down and Mum would read a chapter [of Pride and Prejudice] out loud. I experienced that story for the first time in her voice.”
Later came a love of the adaptations (“I think the best adaptation of the book is the 1995 BBC limited series, but the most fun is Bridget Jones’s Diary”) and a family visit to the Jane Austen Centre in Bath in the UK (“What’s funny about it is that Jane Austen didn’t like Bath; in her letters to her sister, she’s quite rude about it”) that kicked off her solo journey with the classics.
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During a COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, after rereading Pride and Prejudice and rewatching Clueless, Rice went to her mother with a request. “I said, ‘Can you please write a version of Pride and Prejudice that’s like Clueless, set in high school, that’s really fun and funny.’ ”
Even rarer than this request: Kate had prepared something similar over a decade earlier, and the mother-daughter duo would use it as the jumping-off point for Stuck Up & Stupid, their contemporary adaptation of Austen, set in an Australian beach town and written for a young adult reader. “Mum dug up an idea she had in 2008 about writing the next generation [of the Pride and Prejudice Bennets]: what happens to Lydia’s marriage? What happens to Elizabeth and Darcy? Do they have children? What kind of parents are they? So the idea for the book is, we’re following the next generation, but history is repeating itself.”
The Rices spent 40 days passing a draft back and forth in their NSW beach house, weaving experiences from both Hollywood and the beach town into the fictional tale. “We are not any one of the characters wholly,” Rice says, “but there’s a bit of us in every single one of them.”
Published late last year, in March it was among the shortlisted titles in the running for the Australian Book Industry Awards’ Book of the Year for Older Children (ages 13+). The mother-daughter writing team has penned a second novel – an original story, this time – and are plotting a third. All will be for the same young adult readers. “There’s a reason people keep telling stories about teenagers,” Rice says.
“Oh, did I forget to mention it was a musical?”
Rice delivers this line down the barrel of the camera as her high-strung, conniving, third wall-breaking character in the 2022 film Honor Society, while the school play breaks out into song behind her. But the sentiment just as readily applies to Mean Girls. The latest iteration, in which she stars as Cady Heron, is a film version of the stage musical adaptation of Tina Fey’s original 2004 film, itself adapted from the self-help book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman.
The first trailer for the 2024 version gave no indication that this version (of a version of a version …) would be a musical, and summoned a storm of online conversation based, in part, on the mathematically dubious tag line, “This isn’t your mother’s Mean Girls.”
I was 14 when I first saw the 2004 film, a time before social media but rife with “girl-on-girl crime”, as Fey’s character describes the specific brand of gendered high school cruelty. The new film, I tell Rice, made me see that, for all the ways that dialogue around empathy, mental health, diversity and feminism has become commonplace for teenagers today, the same nastiness survives like cockroaches after a nuclear blast.
“There is so much more acceptance, but I also wonder about if there’s more or less hate. Or the same amount,” she says, rolling the idea around for a moment as she sips a can of fizzy, fruity brewed tea. “I think it’s hard to gauge because we have this new system of projecting every thought and feeling so that everyone else can see it. Has [bullying] gone up or do we just see it more now?”
The role of Cady demanded Rice step into the flannel shirt made famous by Lindsay Lohan. Contemporary celebrity culture isn’t a walk in the park, but it has spared Rice the treatment her predecessor, the noughties tabloid mainstay who makes a cameo in the new film, was forced to endure. By the time Lohan starred in (“your mother’s”) Mean Girls, she’d already established herself as a teen icon with starring roles in Freaky Friday, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen – both of which inspired pop single spin-offs – and The Parent Trap. Lohan’s childhood was shaky. She spoke of being a “second parent” to her siblings. When she moved to Los Angeles alone at age 15, she became the de facto breadwinner for her family. Within just a few years of her Mean Girls, Lohan entered her first of what would be six trips to court ordered rehabilitation facilities.
Rice playing Cady Heron in the new screen version of the Mean Girls musical.
It’s a stark contrast to Rice’s upbringing, with parents who readied her for the industry, reassured her when it became tricky, and remain a safe landing pad should she ever need a break. And while the tabloid landscape has changed for young actors, the attention that comes from top billing in a major film was nonetheless “a very crazy experience and really intense” for Rice to live through. Overnight, her “recognisability” went up. Suddenly, she’d look at her phone and find clips of people critiquing the movie, and edits of her and her cast mates and “the dynamics between us” staring back at her.
It doesn’t take long for a TikTok search for “Angourie Rice Mean Girls” to send you down a trail of videos hypothesising she’s dating her co-star Renée Rapp, or unkind commentary about her dreamy, introverted singing compared to the boisterous and theatrical Broadway original – delivered to reach the back of a theatre, not a film camera.
“It’s very different to log on to your social media and be shown things that are in line with your algorithm – but it’s you. It’s like, ‘You might like this video’ – yes, because that’s me. I was there,” she says, laughing.
The cumulative effect of this new attention has heightened Rice’s anxiety and made her feel “watched or monitored … in this sort of internet space” in a way she hasn’t experienced before. It’s also changed her behaviour as a consumer who once got a kick out of funny, viral or zeitgeisty content. “If there’s a movie that I loved or hated – it doesn’t matter which – I find what people are saying about it online. This has sort of made me rethink, ‘How does this contribute to the way that we talk about movies or creatives or creative things?’ You don’t really think about [that] until you are in it, then you’re like, ‘Wait a second, this feels weird.’ ”
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Throughout our conversations, the idea of adaptation comes up frequently. From the book-to-film projects Rice has worked on, to the fiction she’s writing. She’s made adapting the real and universal experiences of teenagers in her work look easy, even if her teen years were anything but relatable. Now, at 23, she’s facing a “funny balance” in where to go next, and what will be waiting for her. “Sometimes I read a role for a teenager and it doesn’t feel right. I can’t connect with it in the same way because I’m not there any more. I think I am craving to play roles that align more with where I’m at in my life now.”
She dreams of living somewhere else, travelling, studying, encountering new ideas and people. Acting still brings her joy, and she’s managed to reach heights with her feet firmly on the ground. But she’s worked equally hard on carving out a life unbeholden to the pressures and whims of such a tricky industry.
As she faces a climbing wall in the bouldering gym, one whose kidney-shaped purple grips evaded her last week when she made four attempts to scale it, Rice mentally plots her route. Being good at something immediately is ideal, but the alternative – learning to fail until you don’t – offers its own satisfaction.
Up go her hands, pinching the tiny rungs. Then her two feet are off the ground. Her biceps quiver, one leg moves in a figure-eight searching for purchase. In a few quick, effortful moves, she is up on top of the structure, grinning down at her sister and me. It doesn’t need to look or feel easy; it’s just as admirable to succeed after showing the work, making it clear how hard you try and how much it means. Disaffected coolness is overrated. Rice raises her arms, briefly, in proud celebration, then comes back down to earth.
To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.
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a chinwag with kate and angourie rice
Actor Angourie Rice and playwright Kate Rice’s new novel is a modern take on Pride and Prejudice.
For most folks, working with a close relative sounds like a recipe for disaster. But for mother–daughter writing duo Kate and Angourie Rice, it has been a dream.
You might recognise Angourie for her roles as Cady Heron in the latest adaption of Mean Girls, Siobhan Sheehan in Mare of Easttown and Betty Brant in the Spider-Man series. Kate, meanwhile, is an award-winning playwright who has also dabbled in acting over the years. They’ve just released their first novel together, Stuck Up & Stupid – a modern twist on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that is set between a fictional Australian coastal community and Los Angeles. The story follows Lily, a level-headed teenager who lives at Pippi Beach with her mum and sisters. When a group of young Hollywood actors and influencers decide to spend their Australian summer at Pippi Beach, the local community is starstruck. But Lily finds the A-listers to be shallow and snobbish – particularly the most famous of them all, Dorian Khan. (If you’re familiar with Pride and Prejudice, we probably don’t need to tell you how the story plays out.)
Angourie came up with the idea for the novel in August 2020, while rereading Pride and Prejudice during Melbourne’s pandemic lockdowns. “I thought, ‘I want this to be made into a teen comedy. I want it to be made into something like Clueless or Bridget Jones’s Diary’,” Angourie recalls. “So I brought it to my mum and I said, ‘Can you write this for me?’ because I just wanted to read it. And she said, ‘Let’s do it together.’”
Kate actually had a similar idea decades ago, so when Angourie came to her with the concept, Kate was “absolutely thrilled”. The duo quickly got to work. From their Melbourne home, Kate and Angourie plotted a solid outline of Pride and Prejudice and their own novel, chapter by chapter. “And then, over summer, Kate bought three notebooks and two mechanical pencils and we wrote the first draft longhand with alternating chapters,” Angourie explains. “So I would write a chapter, give it to Kate, she would make notes, write the next chapter, give it back to me, I’d make notes, write the next chapter. And we did that for about a month.”
The first draft of the novel was completed in January 2021. Fast-forward a couple of years to the book hitting shelves in late 2023. It’s an unusually speedy timeline for the publishing industry, but it seems the stars aligned for Kate and Angourie. Plus, they just work so well together – there were no arguments about plot points or character developments, just support. “It’s funny because a lot of the feedback we’ve had or what people really want to ask is, ‘Did you fight?’ or they say, ‘I could never write a book with my parents. We’d just fight all the time.’ And it’s really interesting to hear that because for me, I can’t imagine writing alone. I also can’t imagine writing with anyone else,” Angourie says.
Like many authors, Kate and Angourie drew on their own experiences when writing the book, including Angourie’s time in Hollywood and the holiday destination the Rice family have been visiting for decades. “The little beach community that we’ve been going to every summer for 20 years is very much like a Jane Austen world,” Kate says. “Everybody knows everybody. Everyone’s peeking in each other’s windows. A boat turns up and everyone’s like, ‘Oh, he’s got a new boat.’ It is very much like that.”
One thing that Kate loves about Pride and Prejudice is “its commitment to change”, and she hopes that readers feel the same way about Stuck Up & Stupid. “You can change your mind; you can change your attitude and you can change for the better,” she says. “And part of changing is admitting you’re wrong.” Angourie agrees, adding: “What I love about Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice is that she is open and is able to admit when she’s wrong and say sorry. She’s a really stubborn character in that she holds on to what she believes in, but she realises that she still can be wrong sometimes. And I think those are two really good qualities to have: sticking with what you believe and also realising you can sometimes be wrong.”
The duo also hopes that, one day, the book is adapted to a series on screen. So, could we potentially see Angourie play Lily? “The slight problem is I’m quickly aging out of that age group. But yeah, I would love to play Lily. And as for our Dorian, I guess we just have to find him. He’s out there somewhere,” she says.
Speaking of Dorians and Mr Darcys, undoubtedly the most important question to ask any Pride and Prejudice fan is this: Matthew Macfadyen or Colin Firth? “We’re both Colin Firth Mr Darcy fans,” Angourie says. “We’re team Colin,” Kate adds, noting that she does still think Matthew Macfadyen is “lovely”.
Stuck Up & Stupid is only fresh in the world, but Angourie and Kate are already working on their next book. This new novel, which Angourie says is a bit “darker” than their debut, is based on a play that Kate wrote in the late 2000s. “It’s secret for the moment but it is for the same audience who enjoyed Stuck Up & Stupid. It’s another coming of age drama-comedy about young people,” Angourie shares.
Angourie attended the CHICAGO Opening Night in Melbourne today. Click on the gallery link below to see all new photos.
I added screencaps to the gallery of Angourie in “Mean Girls”. Click on the gallery links below to see all caps.
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.
She’s a Gem
Angourie Rice is the nicest girl in town… even if she plays a Mean Girl in the movies.
At the end of the new musical Mean Girls, Angourie Rice looks into the camera and surrenders her teen angst into a smile. “Rhinestones don’t shine the way you do,” she sings in the closing girl power anthem,
“I See Stars,” continuing, “We are so real. We are so rare.”
The same realness and rareness apply to natural diamonds, of course—and to Angourie Rice herself. She began her “rare” existence as a New Year’s baby, born on January 1 in Sydney, Australia. (Her name, also rare, is taken from a village in New South Wales. “It rhymes,” she says laughing, “with flowery!”) The daughter of a screenwriter and a director, Rice began acting on beloved kids shows like Mako Mermaids before landing Hollywood roles as Ryan Gosling’s daughter in The Nice Guys and Nicole Kidman’s pupil in The Beguiled. Her critically acclaimed turn as Kate Winslet’s troubled daughter on Mare of Easttown showed a fierce side of Rice that was as unbreakable as a diamond itself. Now as the star of Mean Girls—the first box office blockbuster of 2024—Rice is proving she’s also a precious gem for fans and industry insiders alike.
Rice gets to wear natural diamonds quite a bit more now, too. Her love affair with the stone began in earnest at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017, when she attended alongside Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst. “I normally like very simple jewelry, but I understood this was a big deal, so I would need something more dramatic. I wore an Armani gown and these incredible diamond earrings by Chopard,” she says. “They were on loan, and they came with their own security guard! They showed me the earrings, plus a matching bracelet and this incredible ring. I actually love stacking rings in my normal life; some with stones and some not, but this ring was so stunning, it deserved to have its own moment… The earrings were incredible. I felt so glamorous and almost royal.”
With the release of Mean Girls, Rice becomes a different type of royalty—official Spring Fling Queen and unofficial Queen Bee of North Shore High School, ruling lunch tables and keg parties as the nice-girl-turned-usurper Cady Heron. The role has cemented Rice’s status as a new Hollywood ingénue, with a seasoned red carpet stylist (Sarah Slutsky, who also works with Rachel Zegler and Jessica Williams), outfits by runway greats like Thom Browne and Michael Kors, and nearly a million Instagram followers, which Rice cheerfully admits is “still shocking to me.” But despite her steadily climbing career, Rice admits she almost turned down the role of Cady, even though Tina Fey emailed the actress herself to ask if she’d play the part.
Why the reluctance? Blame another iconic film franchise, Spider-Man. Rice played a supporting role in the Tom Holland reboots, but despite Marvel’s box office superpowers, “I didn’t really think about how big it would be,” Rice admits. “I was just so excited to be in a great movie! It wasn’t until I got to the premiere that I was like, ‘Oh. Ohhh. This is huge.’ It did feel a little overwhelming.” With Mean Girls, the 23-year-old was more wary. “I knew there would be a lot of eyes on it. And Spider-Man was a very supporting role, but Cady in Mean Girls? That’s a whole different thing.”
Rice asked Team Fey if she could have a week to sing through the movie’s key songs and check out the script. She realized the musical numbers, including a certified bop called “Stupid in Love” that could be an Ingrid Michaelson pop hit on its own, were “so much fun to sing. Like, I’d do them, and I couldn’t stop smiling.” Then Rice took her dog for a walk… and that’s how she ended up as Cady Heron. No, really.
“I promise, I wasn’t telling the whole of Australia that I might be Cady Heron!” she exclaims. “But I love talking to my friends and neighbors about my work, because they have no stake in the film industry. They have no biases against certain studios or directors or anything. They’re just people who live next door, and we walk our dogs together, and I’m like, ‘Well, what if I do Mean Girls?’ And they’re like, ‘You seem to be really excited about it. Why wouldn’t you do it?’ Ultimately, I realized, I was the one keeping myself from a really great adventure. So, I came to my senses and said yes.”
The experience put Rice alongside Mean Girls’ original superstar, Lindsay Lohan, both figuratively and literally. (In the worst-kept Hollywood secret since Brangelina, Lohan makes a nifty cameo in the movie; she also appeared with Rice at the movie’s 2024 premiere in Manhattan.) “We don’t know each other at all,” Rice insists, “But we’ve been inside the mind of the same character. We’ve dropped ourselves into the same situation—her, me, and Erika [Henningsen, who originated the role of Cady on Broadway]… At some point in our lives, we’ve all answered to the name Cady, which is something that your brain does unconsciously, and sometimes I can’t unwire it for months. When people say Siobhann,” Rice’s character from the acclaimed 2021 drama Mare of Easttown, “I still turn around, even though we filmed it two years ago.” Oddly, Rice and Henningson will soon play sisters in the short film Loser. Like natural diamonds, the ties that bind Cady Heron seem to be forever.
But though she’s famous for being Mean onscreen, it’s all just a (literal) act. During her shoot for Only Natural Diamonds, Rice embodied the “real, rare, responsible” creed and requested that only cruelty-free cosmetics be used on-set, along with solely vegan food and clothes created with ethical practices. “Kindness is always the most important thing,” she says, noting that her red carpet fashion and beauty looks have likewise been carefully chosen with Slutsky to celebrate well-made and long-lasting designs. (She even called her Thom Browne dachshund bag by its puppy name, “Hector.”)
As we finish our conversation, Rice is wrapping up a week in New York with fellow Mean Girls “Plastics” Reneé Rapp, Avantika Vandanapu, and Bebe Wood. She calls her girl-on-girl crime crew “amazing” and you can tell she truly means it. But when I ask who her rock—or maybe her natural diamond—in Hollywood is, she’s quick to name a mentor from Gen X, not Gen Z. “Jennifer Garner is a total diamond to me,” says Rice, who worked with the movie star in the recent Hulu thriller The Last Thing She Told Me.
“You see her on social media and doing all these silly cute videos. But it’s not an act—that’s just who she is! She’s a completely and unabashedly kind and generous person. She’s a mother and a caretaker, to not just me, but everyone around her, but not in a way that was patronizing at all. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’ve been in the industry for so long; let me tell you how it’s done.’ It was like, ‘I want to care for you and support you. But I also understand that you will tell me what you need.’ She also understands the crew members’ jobs in a way that many actors just don’t. She has such respect and appreciation for them, and so much trust in their work. “I just loved working with her so much. She’s a true diamond for sure. We need all of those we can get.”
It’s time for Rice to head to the airport and back to her native Australia, where she’ll soon get to work on her next project—but it’s not a movie. Instead, she’s co-writing her second book with her mother, Kate Rice, a playwright, and screenwriter. Their first young adult novel, Stuck Up and Stupid, debuted in November of 2023; it’s a send-up of Pride and Prejudice set in an idyllic and low-key beach town that’s invaded by vacationing (and high-maintenance) movie stars. “Jane Austen is so conducive to YA, and to stories about Hollywood, because Hollywood is just a place where people are well-known and rich,” Rice says, giggling. “And that’s what Jane Austen’s books are about are about, too!”
“You know, I once saw a meme that was a one-star star review of Pride and Prejudice,” she continues. “It said, ‘One star: This book is just people going to other people’s houses.’ Which is so true. But in my mind, that’s what makes it five stars. That’s the most interesting, fun thing ever. Just go hang out at your friends’ house.” And if you happen to be wearing diamonds… well… Rice won’t mind. She might even write you into her next big Hollywood story.
Angourie attended Groundhog Day the Musical yesterday. Click on the gallery link below to see all new photos.
