Listen Up: Angourie Rice is the Next Big Aussie Star (and She’s Still in High School)

Listen to our chat with the Jasper Jones actress.

So, you’ve just finished filming a movie with Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe in the States, and are bound for Western Australia to shoot an adaptation of Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones.

No one would complain, but still: Wouldn’t you miss hanging with Ryan and Rusty?

“Well, in America, they don’t have Arnott’s Assorted Creams,” Angourie Rice, star of Jasper Jones and The Nice Guys, explained to Student Edge. Who are we to argue? Monte Carlos trump all.

In Silvey's coming-of-age tale Jasper Jones, directed for the big screen by Rachel Perkins, Rice plays Eliza Skinner, a secret-keeping teenager whose sister has gone missing in the outback town of Corrigan, W.A. (Levi Miller stars as Charlie Bucktin, who tries to solve the mystery and clear the name of his mate Jasper, played by Aaron L. McGrath. Toni Collette, Hugo Weaving and Dan Wyllie offer support as the local adults.)

It would take a special role to tempt the 16-year-old Rice back from her burgeoning career in Hollywood. Jasper Jones certainly offered that.

“I don’t want to play the girlfriend or the single girl, the only girl,” she said.

“I don’t want to be the token girl or anything. I want to play strong and interesting characters and that’s what I loved about Eliza; that she was really important to the story and you needed her.”

With roles in Spider-Man: Homecoming and Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled already in the can, there’s no denying that we’re going to be seeing a lot more of Angourie in the years to come.

Remarkably, she’s built her impressive career all while still in high school. That means, when she’s not in Melbourne and able to rock up to class, she’s being tutored on set.

“I have to do at least three hours of school each day while I’m working on set in America, and on The Nice Guys, whenever I had a 20 minute break, because that counts as a block of school, I would go back to a little tent or a trailer and just do school work for 20 minutes, and then go back on set and do a scene and then come back and do 20 minutes of school,” she said.

“I found it really comforting and really nice to just come back to reality from being on a busy Hollywood set and doing some maths.”

Listen to our full interview to find out what advice Ryan Gosling (himself a former child star) passed along to Angourie, as well as which celeb’s career she admires. (Hint: It’s one of the Fannings.)