Angourie Rice

Angourie Rice was still a child when she made These Final Hours, an Australian film about the last day before the world ends, playing a girl who slows down a man trying to get to a party. Three years later she was in The Nice Guys, and that is the performance people should still be citing: Holly March is the only competent person in a film about two spectacularly incompetent men, and Rice plays her dry, unimpressed and entirely unsentimental.

She has spent the years since moving between two career tracks. There is the studio one: Betty Brant across three Spider-Man films, a couple of minutes each, mostly there to be funny into a school microphone; the flashback teenager in Senior Year; Cady Heron in the 2024 Mean Girls, a lead in a musical remake wearing shoes cut for someone else. And there is the smaller Australian and independent work, which is where the acting is. Ladies in Black won her the AACTA for best actress, Jasper Jones and Every Day gave her real leads, and Mare of Easttown put her in a house full of grief without ever letting her comment on it.

She is still in her twenties, and the interesting question is which of those two tracks she ends up on. On the evidence, the industry keeps offering her the first and she is better at the second.