Every Hollywood career has a press-tour anecdote that gets repeated until it hardens into a legend. Angourie Rice’s was the bookworm one: the Australian girl who read Jane Austen between takes and named Reese Witherspoon’s book club as a role model. When I first wrote about her in May 2023, that was a charming detail. By October 2026 it reads more like a business plan, because Rice is now 25, a published novelist, and a Reese’s Book Club pick herself.
The child actor who skipped the awkward phase
Rice was born in Sydney on 1 January 2001 and started working as a child. Her breakout came with These Final Hours (2013) and then The Nice Guys (2016), where she held her own as the sharp-eyed daughter opposite Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling. (Our 2023 version of this story credited her with a film called The Goodfellas. She was not in it. Nobody her age was.) Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled followed in 2017, alongside Nicole Kidman, and in 2018 her lead in Ladies in Black won her the AACTA Award for Best Actress.
What strikes me about that run is how little of it was “cute kid” casting. Directors kept handing her the character who notices things, which is exactly the job a reader is trained for.
Spider-Man, homework and Mare of Easttown
To most of the world she is Betty Brant, the school-news anchor of the Tom Holland Spider-Man trilogy: Homecoming (2017), Far From Home (2019) and No Way Home (2021), plus the in-universe web series The Daily Bugle. She graduated from Princes Hill Secondary College in Melbourne in 2018, which means a good part of her Marvel career overlapped with actual homework.
Then came the grown-up turns: the Black Mirror episode “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” (2019) and HBO’s Mare of Easttown (2021), where she played Siobhan Sheehan, Kate Winslet’s daughter, a teenager with a podcast and a temper. My read is that Mare is the moment the industry stopped seeing her as a sidekick.
Cady Heron and the Jennifer Garner years
In April 2023 Apple TV+ premiered The Last Thing He Told Me, adapted from Laura Dave’s bestseller, with Rice as Bailey, the guarded stepdaughter of Jennifer Garner’s Hannah, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as the husband who vanishes. It did well enough to come back: season 2 premiered on Apple TV on February 20, 2026, with Garner, Rice and Coster-Waldau returning and David Morse joining the cast.
The “upcoming musical” from our old version arrived in January 2024: Mean Girls, the screen adaptation of the Broadway show, which itself grew out of the 2004 film (not the 90s, as we once claimed; I have since checked the calendar). Rice played Cady Heron, the Lindsay Lohan role, and sang it. Taking over a part that a whole generation can quote is a thankless job, and she did it without trying to be Lohan, which I think was the smart choice.
The bookworm becomes the author
Here is where the old anecdote pays off. With her mother, the AWGIE Award-winning playwright Kate Rice, she co-wrote Stuck Up & Stupid, first published by Walker Books Australia in 2023: a modern Pride and Prejudice in which an Aussie teen named Lily collides with a Hollywood heartthrob named Dorian Khan. In other words, she wrote herself the Jane Austen project she used to say she dreamed of starring in.
When the book came out in the US through Candlewick on May 6, 2025, Reese’s Book Club chose it as its summer YA pick. The girl who listed Witherspoon’s book club as an inspiration ended up on its shelf, which is the kind of plot neatness Austen would have cut as too tidy. A second mother-daughter novel, My Wonderful Disgrace, followed in 2026, and Rice also hosts a literary podcast, The Community Library.
What she is doing in 2026
The screen work has not slowed down. Finding Emily, a romantic comedy shot in the UK with Spike Fearn as Owen, a young man hunting for a girl named Emily, opened in Australian cinemas on May 21, 2026. Rice plays Emily Raine, an Emily with ulterior motives. “I just want to keep going and keep making movies that I love and that I’m passionate about,” she told Variety Australia.
In August Deadline reported that she and Jane Krakowski had wrapped the indie Nice Eggs, directed by Amanda Lipitz. And in September Stan, the Australian streamer, announced a series of Stuck Up & Stupid with Rice in the lead. So the Austen role is coming after all; she just had to write it first.
A name from the coast
One fact has not aged at all. She is named after Angourie, a small surfing town on the north coast of New South Wales where her grandmother lived. It is a nice reminder that for all the Marvel sets and Apple premieres, the origin story is a beach most of the world has never heard of.
Three years ago I ended this piece by predicting her dream of period films would come true soon. I was half right, which in Hollywood forecasting counts as a win: the period film turned out to be a modern Austen, and she brought the book with her, the way she always did.
Sources
- Angourie Rice on Instagram, October 2026
- Reese’s Book Club: Stuck Up and Stupid
- Apple TV Press: The Last Thing He Told Me
- Variety Australia: Finding Emily star Angourie Rice on chasing success (May 2026)
- Deadline: Stan making McLeod’s Daughters revival and Angourie Rice show (September 2026)
- Deadline: Jane Krakowski, Angourie Rice to star in indie Nice Eggs (August 2026)
- Walker Books Australia: Stuck Up & Stupid
- David Jones: interview with Angourie Rice
- Wikipedia: Angourie Rice
