Angourie Rice

Angourie Rice is an Australian actress whose career has traced a remarkable arc from precocious child performer in independent Australian cinema to a recognisable presence in Hollywood blockbusters and prestige television. Born on 1 January 2001 in Perth, Western Australia, she grew up in a creatively engaged household. Her father, Jeremy Rice, is a director and writer, and her mother, Kate Rice, is a playwright and dramaturg, an environment that shaped her early instincts about storytelling, craft and the practical realities of the screen and stage. Her unusual first name was inspired by the village of Angourie on the New South Wales north coast, a touch of geography that lent her an immediately distinctive billing.

Rice began acting in short films as a child, appearing in projects such as Transmission and The Ballad of Finn and Pearl, but her breakthrough came at the age of twelve in Zak Hilditch's bleak Australian apocalypse drama These Final Hours, released in 2013. Cast as Rose, a young girl trying to find her father in the hours before a global firestorm reaches Perth, she anchored the film's emotional centre opposite Nathan Phillips. Critics responded warmly to the unforced gravity of her work, and the role positioned her as one of the more interesting young Australian screen performers of her generation. The performance attracted attention well beyond Australia, and within a couple of years she had moved into international productions.

Her crossover into Hollywood came in 2016 with Shane Black's neo-noir comedy The Nice Guys, in which she played Holly March, the sharp, morally precocious daughter of Ryan Gosling's hapless private investigator Holland March. Holly functioned as the film's conscience and as a comic foil to the bumbling adults around her, and Rice held her own in extended scenes with Gosling and Russell Crowe. Many reviewers singled her out, and the role established her ability to play characters older and more self-possessed than her years. The same year she appeared in the Australian science-fiction drama Jasper Jones, adapted from Craig Silvey's novel, playing Eliza Wishart, a small-town girl entangled in a 1960s mystery.

In 2017 Rice took on the role of Betty Brant in Jon Watts's Spider-Man: Homecoming, the first Marvel Cinematic Universe Spider-Man film starring Tom Holland. Her Betty was reimagined as a school news anchor at Midtown School of Science and Technology, a small but recurring presence woven into the high-school texture of the franchise. She returned to the part in Spider-Man: Far From Home in 2019, where Betty's brief romance with Jacob Batalon's Ned Leeds during a European school trip became one of the film's lighter pleasures, and again in Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021. The Marvel work gave her global visibility without ever becoming the totality of her output.

Around the same period she pursued more adult and atmospheric material. She appeared in Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled in 2017, playing Jane, one of the cloistered students at a Virginia girls' seminary during the American Civil War whose ordered world is disrupted by the arrival of Colin Farrell's wounded Union soldier. The film, which won Coppola the Best Director prize at Cannes, allowed Rice to work within an ensemble that included Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning, and to study a particular kind of restrained, period chamber piece. She also led the dystopian young-adult adaptation Every Day in 2018, playing Rhiannon, a teenager who falls in love with an entity that wakes each morning in a different body, a role that required her to act opposite a constantly rotating cast of scene partners.

Rice continued to alternate between Australian and American projects. She voiced characters in animation, contributed narration to audiobooks, and took on quieter independent roles. Her television work expanded significantly with HBO's Mare of Easttown in 2021, in which she played Siobhan Sheehan, the college-bound daughter of Kate Winslet's grieving small-town detective Mare. The limited series, created by Brad Ingelsby, was acclaimed for its naturalistic portrait of a working-class Pennsylvania community, and Siobhan's storyline, which traced a young woman trying to leave home while her family fractured around her, gave Rice some of her most layered material to date. Her scenes with Winslet were widely praised, and the series' awards run, which included Emmys for Winslet and several of her co-stars, raised Rice's profile in the prestige-television space.

In 2024 she stepped into one of the most scrutinised roles of her career, playing Cady Heron in the musical film adaptation of Mean Girls, directed by Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. and based on the Tina Fey-scripted Broadway musical. Inheriting a part originated on screen by Lindsay Lohan, Rice led an ensemble that included Reneé Rapp as Regina George and Auli'i Cravalho as Janis. The film leaned into its musical-theatre roots while updating the high-school satire for a social-media generation, and Rice's performance balanced Cady's mathematical innocence with her drift toward Plastic-style cruelty. The same year she appeared in Robot Dreams-adjacent festival fare and continued to take on smaller independent projects.

Beyond performing, Rice has cultivated a parallel life as a writer. She has published essays and a book of poetry titled Stuck, released in 2018 in Australia, and has spoken openly in interviews about reading, writing and the difficulty of growing up in public. She has tended to avoid the more performative aspects of celebrity, maintaining a relatively low social-media footprint and speaking thoughtfully about the pressures placed on young actresses. She has cited filmmakers such as Sofia Coppola and Jane Campion as influences, and she has periodically returned to theatre and short-form work in Australia.

Now in her mid-twenties, Rice occupies an unusual position in contemporary screen acting. She has the franchise credentials of the Marvel films, the prestige-television credibility of Mare of Easttown, the indie pedigree of The Beguiled and These Final Hours, and the leading-lady visibility of Mean Girls, all before the point at which many actresses of her generation have begun headlining their first major feature. Her career suggests a performer methodically choosing variety over typecasting, and her trajectory points toward a long and substantive future on screen.