It’s Not Angourie Rice’s Fault You’re About to Fall in Love With Her

In 2002, Sony Pictures released the first of what would become three Spider-Man films starring Tobey Maguire. Over the next 22 years, we would also get two starring Andrew Garfield, two animated features, and three starring Tom Holland, the most recent of which included the return of Maguire and Garfield as their respective Peters Parker, which audiences adored. Nostalgia is not a crime! Three Aunt Mays, two Uncle Bens, one notorious stage musical, a lot of great power and even more great responsibility. Why not? Spider-Man is an iconic American character, a high school loser who finds the power within and defeats a great evil. Timeless story.

As is, I’ll posit, Mean Girls. In the 20 years since the movie’s release in 2004, we’ve gotten one (bad and unrelated) sequel, one stage adaptation, and now, a movie of the musical of the movie. Every generation deserves their own high school outcast who takes down the big bad bully, and mine was Cady Heron, as played by Lindsay Lohan. For teens today, it’s Cady Heron, as played—and sung!—by Angourie Rice (who, coincidentally, also stars alongside Holland in the latest Spidey flicks).

Angourie Rice and Lindsay Lohan—the two Cadys—at the premiere of the Mean Girls musical movie.

John Nacion/Getty Images

Of the Lohan movie, Rice said, “I had it on DVD. My parents would take me to their work and put me in a corner and put Mean Girls on a little portable DVD player, so I watched that movie over and over and over again as a kid.” Born in Sydney, Australia on the first day of the new millennium, Rice was was a steadfast congregant in The Church of Glen Coco: “Those scenes, those lines are, like, burned into my brain. Every sleepover we would watch Mean Girls along with other chick flicks from the ‘90s and 2000s. It’s been a huge part of my life and adolescence, for sure.”

The good news: the new movie is a total blast. The better news: Rice is a multi-talented artist disguised as the nice girl from The Nice Guys. She can sing, act, write, and bake, and I predict one day soon, she’ll be directing. Her youth would almost make you hate her, except that she’s so sweet. Like, you could sit with her. Even wearing a vest.

Once you’ve seen the new Mean Girls, read on for behind-the-scenes stories and lots of fangirl digressions in this interview between Angourie Rice and Glamour:

Would you describe yourself as more “fetch” or “grool”?

I would definitely describe myself as “grool” over “fetch.” I think fetch is for cool people. I think grool is for nerds, and that’s me.

Tell me about getting cast as Cady.

The casting process for me began with, amazingly, an email from Tina Fey. She emailed me to say, “Here’s the script, I think you’d be great for Cady, this is what we’re doing, this is what we’re making, how we’re making it.” I was in shock. I was like, Oh my god, I can’t believe she would send me this email’ I read the script, I thought it was so fun. It was very fresh and new and exciting but also very familiar. Having grown up watching the original movie, I recognized all the things that I loved, and also was so excited by all the new things that they put in there.

Bebe Wood (Gretchen), Angourie Rice (Cady), Avantika (Karen).

©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

I actually took about a week, two weeks, to decide if I wanted to take the job or not, because I was so nervous. It’s such a huge responsibility. It’s a movie that I feel a lot of responsibility toward because it’s something that I loved growing up. Also the singing aspect, I really wanted to get that right, I really wanted to connect with the songs. Ultimately, I realized, Well, I’d be crazy to not take it, I would regret it. Every time I sang the songs and worked on them, I realized I was getting chills. I was getting so excited by these songs. I wanted to chase that feeling, I wanted to be a part of it.

What was it like once you got to set? Was there anyone you especially clicked with?

I enjoyed working with everyone. Truly it was such a great experience and I learned something from everyone. I will say, the first time I met Bebe [Wood], who plays Gretchen, I was like, Oh my god, I think we’re the same person! We have very similar interests, we have very similar energies in terms of just tonally how we speak and how we interact with other people, I think we’re quite similar. She was someone who I, when I first met her, I knew we were gonna be great friends.

And the same can be said for everyone in the cast. Everyone is so, so wonderful, so kind, and we genuinely all get along which is great because you don’t want to make a movie called Mean Girls and have there actually be mean girls in the cast.

You really don’t! Have you ever been Mean Girl’d?

I think we all have experiences where we don’t get along with someone or we feel excluded or we’re resentful of someone. I think that’s just a normal part of being in the world. The older I get, I realize that someone being mean to you, it’s not always about you. Something else is going on. When I was a kid I took it a lot more to heart, but now I’m like Well, if there’s disagreements, it’s okay, we can just move on.

What was the hardest number to shoot?

“Revenge Party” was the hardest, but it was also the most fun. It’s an eight-minute sequence and we filmed a little bit of it every single week. We would film in small sections because it takes place in so many different locations with so many different cast members. A lot of story is told in that sequence. That was hard because every week we would have to drop back into this number, back into where we were at that point in the story. At the same time, it was kind of the most fun because it was the number that brought everyone together.

Did you have a favorite moment to shoot?

One of the most exciting things for me to film was actually during “Revenge Party,” there’s a particular shot that’s a close-up of me walking down a hallway, and it’s a very specific shot and it looks different from all the others, and the reason is that I was actually wearing a camera on my body. It was this sort of rig—

I know the shot you’re talking about! The shaky cam!

Yeah! That was a camera on a pole and it was strapped to my body in a harness—it’s called a SnorriCam, I learned. That was really exciting because it was the first time I got to be my own camera operator. To use this new and exciting technology and get a shot that’s really specific, that was a lot of fun to do. It was heavy and it was kind of hard to shoot but very exciting.

Do you think maybe you’ll direct one of these days? Now that you have behind the camera experience?

Directing, sure, but camera operating, no. That camera that I was wearing was like a fifth of the weight of the Steadicams that operators wear, so there’s no way I could do that. I have a new appreciation for camera operators.

When you’re shooting these really intense singing and dancing scenes, obviously it’s a lot of fun, but there’s also some wear and tear. How did you relax at home?

What comes to mind is what I did on the weekends to decompress: bake a loaf of bread. That was how I would knead out any stress from the week and to make something tangible. When you’re making a movie, you come home at the end of the week and you’re like, I’ve seen so much, I’ve done so much, but I can’t hold any of it. I can’t see any of it play back. You sort of lose sight of what you’re making. So every weekend to make something and spend time on it and then actually have a physical product at the end was very good for my mental health.

You also wrote a book! With your mom! My mom is also a writer and would die if I agreed to write a book with her. How did that come about? Are you gonna do another one?

Yes, there is another one in the works. [The first book, Stuck Up and Stupid is] a YA contemporary retelling of Pride and Prejudice, and I went to my mum, during Covid lockdown in 2020, and I said, “Can you do an updated version of Pride and Prejudice? I really wanna read it.” And she said, “Why don’t we do it together?” That’s where it started.

My prediction is that from now on, Mean Girls will be your calling card, but before, what’s the role you get recognized the most for?

Definitely “the girl from Spider-Man” I get a lot. But I will say, The Nice Guys—especially with people who watch a LOT of movies—is something that people bring up. What’s exciting is that it has a cult following. People who love it really love it, and they’ve watched it so many times and they want to tell me about it, so I love that.

First Spider-Man, now Mean Girls. Is there another dream reboot that you would love to be in? Or if you could pick a movie, pick a character, and make it a musical and be in it tomorrow, what would it be?

One of my favorite movie musicals is Chicago. I think that takes the movie musical to another level, it’s so clever. I would love to be a part of that somehow. I would love to play Roxie Hart.

It’s funny because I would also talk to other people on set and pose them the question: singing ability, age, gender, that doesn’t matter, what role would you play on Broadway in any musical? And it was so cool hearing everyone’s answers. My answer is Javert in Les Mis. Out of anything , if I was a middle aged man with a beautiful deep voice, that is the role I would play, hundred percent. [Laughs]

I think you can get there. Haircut, maybe a couple singing lessons in that lower register.

“Stars” is one of my favorite musical theater songs of all time, so to sing that would be incredible.

You were in The Beguiled so I have to ask… tell me about working with Sofia Coppola.

I’m so glad you’re asking this because I also love Sofia Coppola so, so, so much.

When that movie came around, I originally auditioned for a different role, and I didn’t get it. And two months later they were like, “They’re considering you for another role, will you audition again?” I was like, “I will do anything to be in this movie. Please, please, please.”

She was incredible and I learned so much from her. She commands the set with grace and kindness and never raises her voice. If there’s a problem, or something that they can’t shoot for whatever reason, she would just go, “Okay. That’s fine. We’ll move on, we’ll find a solution, if we can’t find a solution, we’ll just keep going.” The way that she ran that set with such kindness and appreciation for everyone’s job was so admirable.

Back to Mean Girls. Why do you think this story has stood the test of time so much that everyone your age has seen it, everyone my age has seen it, we’re on the third version of it, and it’s become this text of girlhood?

I think it all comes back to Tina. She created a story that was about young girls and was so funny, but was also so honest. The reality of what it’s like to go through high school, it doesn’t change. Twenty years later, people still want validation, they still want to fit in, they still want the popular kids to like them.

Also, I think the quotes are so timeless because Tina specifically made it so. She didn’t include any slang from the time. That’s why she made up “fetch.” She knew that any slang, by the time the movie came out, would be out of date, and it’s that cleverness in her writing and thinking ahead as a writer that makes Mean Girls so timeless.

MEAN GIRLS, from left: Angourie Rice, Christopher Briney, 2024. ph: JoJo Whilden / © Paramount Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

What was it like working with Tina?

Incredible. She was amazing to work with. Very soft-spoken. She’s soft-spoken, which is great because it makes everyone else shut up and listen to her. It’s this power that is very kind and not demanding or domineering.

She’s also such a clever writer in that she’s thought about every single line. Nothing in there has just been typed off without thinking about it. I would ask her questions like, “What does this mean, why is she saying this, what’s the reason behind this joke?” and she would have an answer. She would also have three or four different jokes, and would try them out, and whichever one was funniest or got the best laugh was put in the movie. That understanding of trying lots of different things, and playing around, that’s how you get the best product.

And if you could play a different role in Mean Girls, regardless of age and gender…

I’ve always loved Janis. Auli’i [Cravalho] doesn’t know this, I haven’t spoken to her about it, but I love the role of Janis so much, and she has some of my favorite songs. I don’t think I have the grit to play Janis, but she’s a character that I love so much, and especially her songs, I sing them in the shower.

You have a bit of an anti-hero streak with your ideal characters, Janis and Javert.

So true!

You have such an innocent look, are you always being type-casted as these ingenues and really you wanna be a bad girl?

Maybe! It is funny you say that because I feel like some of the roles that I’ve wanted most with my whole heart and didn’t get, it was because my face was too…my sister says I have “happy eyes,” and I think maybe there is something in there. Yeah, I can think of a few roles that I didn’t get because for whatever reason, my energy is slightly different. Maybe one day I’ll get there. One day I’ll be Javert and it will be amazing!

What do you hope people take from the movie? Or know before they see it?

I think this movie will really surprise you. You never know what a movie’s going to be until you sit down to watch it—I hope audiences go in with an open mind. I think no matter how many times you’ve seen the 2004 Mean Girls or the Broadway show, or if you’ve never seen Mean Girls before in your life, I think you will still get something out of this. It’s fun, it’s glittery, it’s pink. But there’s also a lot of heart to it. I think you’ll leave the cinema feeling you just saw an incredible spectacle but, hopefully it’ll also leave you with some emotional impact.

What was your reaction when you saw the final cut?

I just got chills. I couldn’t stop smiling throughout the whole thing because I was seeing how everyone’s hard work cut together. Not only the actors but also the dancers, the set design, the costumes, the hair, the makeup, everything came together in this beautiful, beautiful movie. It made me so happy to see it.

Thank you for reminding me, I cannot believe I let this go on this long before we talked about costumes! Favorite piece of wardrobe? 2000s fashion? “Ex-wife” costume? Anything you can tell me!

I can tell you that we tried on many pink polo shirts but the sweater vest was the best. It was updated, it was fresh, it was fun, it was something that Damian would wear. I loved that.

Avantika (Karen), Angourie Rice (Cady), Reneé Rapp (Regina), Bebe Wood (Gretchen).

©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

The ex-wife outfit, that was a vintage dress that they found online and did it up with blood and everything. I had like three layers of petticoats. It was very warm in all those layers and the wig. It wasn’t my least favorite costume, but the blood on my face was really hard for me to deal with. But I liked the outfit overall.

You probably had to be in it for a while. Halloween is a pretty long sequence.

I was in it for three days.

I can also tell you about Cady’s party outfit, the black dress, which is so iconic. In the 2004 movie, Lindsay Lohan wears a black dress with a big pink stripe down the side. The black dress that I wear, if you look closely, there is a small pink stripe down the back of the dress. Which I think is a beautiful homage to the original dress while also being something slightly different.

That is a great encapsulation of the whole movie. A wonderful homage, but slightly different.

Elizabeth Logan is Glamour.com’s pop culture writer. She is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School Of The Arts and the owner of one black cat. You can (and should!) follow her on twitter at @lizzzzzielogan.