Meet Angourie Rice: Rising Hollywood star, published writer, podcaster – and just 23

This story is a part of the April 27 edition of Good Weekend.See all 17 stories.

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.”Credit: Courtesy of Angourie Rice

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.

‘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.’

Director Bruce Beresford

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.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.

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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.”

Rice (at left) at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017, with The Beguiled’s cast – including from left, Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, director Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst.Credit: Getty Images

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.”

Rice as Siobhan in HBO’s Mare of Easttown (2021).Credit: Alamy

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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”.

Angourie Rice (second from left) with dad Jeremy, sister Kalliope and mum Kate.Credit: Courtesy of Angourie Rice

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.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.Credit: Alamy

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.

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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.

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.Credit: Alamy

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.

‘Sometimes I read a role for a teenager and it doesn’t feel right.’

Angourie Rice

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.’ ”

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.

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