Mean Girls star Angourie Rice belongs to six libraries. She’s not sure if that’s allowed. Each time the 23-year-old Australian actor films in a new city, she tries to snag a new membership; so, yes, Rice has a local library card from New Jersey after her time making the Mean Girls movie musical, in which she plays protagonist Cady Heron, originated by Lindsay Lohan in the 2004 film.
During filming, she read Station Eleven, the post-apocalyptic pandemic graphic novel by Emily St. John Mandel; among many themes, the novel (and its HBO series adaptation) is about the enduring impact of art and storytelling. A good story can shape the way we see the world, the way we see and sustain ourselves. Broadly, this is the topic of Rice’s podcast, The Community Library, which offers lite literary criticism in episodes like, “Why You Should Be Critical of the Things You Love” and “The Literary World of Taylor Swift.” In that latter podcast episode, which came out in June 2023 after she finished filming Mean Girls, she links Swift’s Midnights track “You’re on Your Own Kid” to Cady’s journey of self-discovery.
“I started the podcast because I wasn't working,” she tells Teen Vogue of the podcast’s inception in 2019. “I had finished school. I didn't have anything else on, and I wanted to share my love of stories, make critical thinking really accessible. Also, I wanted something that was all my own, where I made every single decision.”
Rice is a close reader, delivering her podcast mini-essays with a soothing voice, pulled-back curiosity, and occasional delight at her own discoveries about herself and what she’s reading. She brings that energy to our Zoom interview, seated in front of a row of Mean Girls-pink junket lockers, engaged and excited to talk about the themes in the film and how they relate to her life and work. She pays attention to the narratives at play.
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Rice isn’t boisterous and doesn’t have overt theater kid energy (non-derogatory), though she started there. Audiences have already clocked the differences between her Cady and Erika Henningsen’s in the Broadway production. Dreamier and more restrained, Rice’s Cady isn’t a belter; she’s more prone to long looks, quietly taking in the world and somewhat awkwardly engaging with it. Her Cady would happily recede into the background, which is maybe why she’s drawn to Regina George’s sense of presence. Perhaps fittingly, given Renée Rapp’s assertion that her Regina is a lesbian, she’s a master of an intense, enraptured gaze toward the queen bee. Does she like-like her or want to be like her?
“That happens a lot in female friendships in high school, that there's sort of this intensity that is so close and intimate,” Rice muses. “That's definitely represented in their relationship with each other, this intensity and this longing.”
Born in Sydney and raised largely in Perth, Australia, Rice is the daughter of two artistic parents; her dad is a theater director and producer, her mom is a playwright. She and her younger sister spent their childhood in rehearsal rooms, where her parents would settle them in a corner with a portable DVD player to watch High School Musical 2, The Sound of Music, and, of course, Mean Girls. Those experiences cultivated in her a love for performing. “I also wanted everyone to like me,” she says. “I guess that hasn't changed.”
Around age six, she began acting in commercials and short films and continued on with acting as a hobby, simultaneously pursuing dance and taking ballet, contemporary, and hip-hop classes. Acting became a job around the time she turned 12. Soon, she had a U.S. agent and was auditioning for bigger projects. And then she booked Spider-Man.
Rice played Tom Holland and Zendaya’s characters’ classmate Betty Brant across three movies, a process that was central in her life from age 15 to age 20 when Spider-Man: No Way Home came out. “It was the most visible project I'd ever done,” she reflects now. “That's five years of my life playing Betty, being known for playing Betty, and five very impactful years as well. Those later adolescent teenage years are so important in shaping who you are, so it was a huge part of me growing up.”
Her first leading role came in Honor Society, a coming-of-age movie where she starred as overachieving high school manipulator Honor Rose alongside Gaten Matarazzo — a “reverse Cady story,” Rice laughs. “She starts out calculated and then gains a heart.” It helped her realize she’s drawn to stories of transformation, and of success and failure. “I think it takes a lot for a person to admit that they're wrong and admit that they're sorry,” she says. “I'm interested in what happens when people fail and what does failure mean? What does success mean?”
Failure is ever-present for actors, who constantly put themselves through the rejection machine. She still has some movies that stick in her craw. “There are some projects that I still, I won't even watch the movie because I'm so gutted that it wasn't me. I'm still jealous of the person who got it and upset that it wasn't me,” she says. And it’s not even that they’re not skilled and she deserved it more — she knows they’re all good actors, that the bar is high, that it can be about vibes or chemistry, that so much is subjective. There’s so much she can’t change.
And still… “Well, I used to be really, really upset about this one, but it's been so long now. It's been over 10 years, so I've let it go,” she says, and you almost believe her. “When I was younger, I got to the top four for The Book Thief, and I loved that book so much. It was one of my favorite books ever. They screen-tested four of us. They flew us all to Berlin, and we all did costume tests and hair and makeup tests, and we did camera tests with set pieces and everything. I really, really wanted it, and I obviously didn't get it, and I was really crushed by that one.” She never saw the movie, which ended up starring Sophie Nélisse, who now plays Shauna in Yellowjackets.
And maybe if she’d gotten the role, it would have changed the trajectory of everything, sprung off an alternative universe with its own distinctive narrative beats. There’s “everything happens for a reason,” and then there’s “everything happens.” She thinks about the characters in Mean Girls and why people end up the way they do. “It's not as simple as just being mean, there's always something else going on underneath,” she says. “There's motivation. It's never senseless.”
She extends that courtesy to social media commenters — the movie incorporates TikTok as the gossip and backlash machine du jour. “It's wild out there,” she says. “There are some parts of the internet that I love, and then some parts that I don't love as much… [but] the problem isn't always social media, sometimes the problem is me. If you want to feel bad about yourself and waste time, you'll find a way to do that without social media… social media can be an enabler, but for me, it was also a realization of, oh, I also need to self-reflect and give myself tools to deal with this internally.”
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Rice isn’t so interested in wasting time. When there are no acting projects, make a podcast. When there’s a book you want to read that isn’t out there, write it. Last year, she published her first novel, a young adult project titled Stuck Up & Stupid she co-wrote with her mom that reimagines Pride and Prejudice in the style of teen rom-coms. When she asked her mom to write it, her mom asked her to collaborate instead.
“It was a challenge,” she says. “But again, it was this creative project that I wanted to feel... I wanted to have control over it, and also to write a story that was so close and meaningful to my life and to my relationship with my mom.” She still loves stories — and she’s now empowered to craft her own.
