Angourie Rice

Angourie Rice does her best work at the edge of a scene. In Mare of Easttown (2021) she plays Siobhan Sheehan, the daughter in a house full of louder people, and while Kate Winslet and Jean Smart bicker across the kitchen table she is the one carrying the family's grief for a brother the series takes its time to explain. She does it mostly by saying nothing. We kept looking at her when the scene was plainly built for the two women arguing, because she looked like the one person at that table who had already lived through what the others were still talking about.

That is the habit, and the career so far has rewarded it. She started as a child in Perth, in short films and Australian television, took the lead in These Final Hours (2013) at twelve, and then landed Holly March in The Nice Guys (2016): a girl in a room with Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe who had to hold her own and did, with the timing of someone a good deal older. Sofia Coppola cast her in The Beguiled (2017); the Spider-Man films used her three times as Betty Brant, from Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) onward; Australia gave her Ladies in Black (2018). The common thread is a clever, observant girl standing next to somebody with more lines. She is good at standing next to people.

The question is what happens when she is the one everybody else is standing next to. Mean Girls (2024) put her in the middle as Cady Heron and we did not think it worked. Her Cady is pleasant and small-voiced, and Tina Fey's script keeps asking her to stand at the edge of her own story while Auliʻi Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey narrate it and Reneé Rapp walks off with it. Some of that is the writing, which has now been through three versions and still treats Cady as a camera rather than a character. Some of it is Rice, whose stillness reads as attention when Winslet is opposite her and as absence when the frame is hers alone.

We should be fair about that. Understatement is a real skill and a rare one in somebody who has been working since childhood; most actors who grow up on set learn to fill a silence, and she has learned to leave one. The trouble is that a musical, of all forms, wants somebody who will fill it. Put her in a drama where the loud people are somebody else's problem and she is worth watching. Put her at the top of a comedy with songs and you get a performer doing carefully what the film needed done carelessly.

Next comes Finding Emily (2026), with her name first again. On the evidence so far, we would rather it were second.