Angourie Rice Spent Years Playing the Daughter. Now She Writes Her Own Lead

Angourie Rice

Photo: Televizia JOJ / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 1, 2001 Sydney, Australia
Occupation	Actress and writer
Known for	Spider-Man: No Way Home, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home
Awards	AACTA

The scene that made Angourie Rice is one in which she is barely supposed to matter. In The Nice Guys, Shane Black’s comedy about two hapless private eyes in Los Angeles, she plays Holly March, the teenager who keeps sneaking into her father’s cases and cracking them faster than he does. Ryan Gosling falls through glass, Russell Crowe throws the punches, and the girl in the back seat is the only adult in the car. It was her breakout, and the industry drew a precise lesson from it: put her next to the star.

So it did, for a decade. She was Betty Brant, the school news anchor of Tom Holland‘s Spider-Man films, and Siobhan, the daughter Kate Winslet‘s detective keeps failing to reach in Mare of Easttown. Later came Bailey, the teenager stranded with a stepmother played by Jennifer Garner in The Last Thing He Told Me. She was good in every one of them, often the steadiest presence on screen. The open question was whether she could hold the center of a story. Her current answer is being filmed in Sydney, and she wrote it.

Rice is named after Angourie, a coastal village on the north coast of New South Wales where her grandmother lived. She was born in Sydney on 1 January 2001 into a household of storytellers, her father Jeremy Rice a director and her mother Kate Rice a writer, and the family moved often: five years in Perth, one in Munich, then Melbourne, where she still lives, in the inner suburb of Collingwood.

Perth is where the work began, in short films and guest spots on Australian television. At eleven she led Zak Hilditch’s short Transmission and won the best actress award at the St Kilda Short Film Festival. Hilditch then gave her the role of Rose, a kidnapped girl rescued by a stranger in the last twelve hours before an asteroid firestorm, in These Final Hours, her first feature.

After The Nice Guys opened in 2016, the calendar filled quickly. Sofia Coppola cast her as one of the pupils at the Virginia boarding school of The Beguiled, and she played Eliza Wishart in the Australian adaptation of Jasper Jones. Marvel handed her Betty Brant in Spider-Man: Homecoming, a part that grew in Spider-Man: Far From Home and returned for Spider-Man: No Way Home. The leading roles came from smaller films. In Every Day, adapted from David Levithan’s novel, she was Rhiannon, a teenager in love with a soul that wakes up in a different body each morning. In Bruce Beresford’s Ladies in Black, set among the shop assistants of a Sydney department store during the Christmas rush of 1959, she played Lisa, the new girl on the floor, and won the AACTA Award for best lead actress.

Television widened the range. In the Black Mirror episode “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” she was a lonely fan who befriends a robot copy of a pop star played by Miley Cyrus. In HBO’s Mare of Easttown she held her own opposite Winslet, and both actresses later admitted to nerves over the Delaware County accent. Variety put her on its actors-to-watch list in 2021. Apple TV’s The Last Thing He Told Me followed, and its second season ran from February to April 2026.

Mean Girls was supposed to settle the question. As Cady Heron in the 2024 film of the Broadway musical, scripted again by Tina Fey, Rice was at the head of a Paramount musical with a ready-made audience of millions. The film exposed the limits of the type she had perfected. Her Cady was warm and alert, close to Lindsay Lohan‘s original in the early scenes, but several critics found her less convincing once Cady turns cruel, and her singing sounded slight next to Reneé Rapp, who had played Regina George on Broadway and collected much of the praise. The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney dismissed the whole production as a labored reincarnation. The quality that made her so valuable beside Gosling or Winslet, a quiet and watchful intelligence, is not the same as owning the frame. The musical made the difference visible.

Her response has been to pick smaller films with more inside them. In Clement Virgo’s Steal Away, adapted from Karolyn Smardz Frost’s history Steal Away Home, she is Fanny, a sheltered teenager whose bond with Cécile, a young refugee her family takes in, played by Mallori Johnson, undoes what she has been taught. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025 and reached Canadian cinemas in July 2026. Finding Emily, a Working Title romantic comedy set in Manchester and directed by Alicia MacDonald, cast her as Emily Raine, a psychology student researching love who helps Spike Fearn’s sound engineer hunt for a woman who left him half a phone number. It opened in British cinemas in May 2026 and in American ones in August.

Away from sets, Rice has built a second life around books. Since 2019 she has hosted The Community Library, a podcast about reading critically, and with her mother she wrote Stuck Up & Stupid, a young-adult novel that moves Pride and Prejudice to the Australian coast and puts a vain movie star in the Darcy position. It was shortlisted for the Indie Book Awards in 2024 and found its audience on BookTok. A second mother-daughter novel, My Wonderful Disgrace, followed in May 2026.

That novel is now a series. Stan began shooting its eight-episode adaptation in Sydney in September 2026, with Gretel Vella adapting and Jocelyn Moorhouse as set-up director, and Yvonne Strahovski joins the cast. Rice plays Lily Bennet and produces alongside her mother. Still in post-production is Nice Eggs, Amanda Lipitz’s first narrative feature, in which she plays Cori Mulligan, a small-town young woman determined to become a writer, opposite Jane Krakowski as the mother whose failed dreams spill onto her daughters. Once again, Rice is playing somebody’s daughter. This time the film is about her.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Kate Winslet, Jennifer Garner, Mare of Easttown, Mean Girls, Angourie Rice

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