For an actor, even a Hollywood role can come at a price. And for 13-year-old Angourie Rice, there are a couple of clear drawbacks to landing a part in a blockbuster movie. She leaves on Wednesday to spend several months in the US, playing opposite Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling in a period crime drama. But she's going to miss playing in the school orchestra at the end-of-year performance. And, she says, with some regret, she had a really good ticket for a Katy Perry concert.
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From now until February next year she will be in Atlanta and Los Angeles shooting The Nice Guys, a big-budget film set in the 1970s. It is directed and co-written by Shane Black (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3). She will play Ryan Gosling's daughter, who regularly accompanies her police officer father in his work.
Angourie is composed, thoughtful, and has been acting for years in shorts, films, commercials, theatre and television. Her parents, Jeremy, a director, and Kate, a writer, both work in theatre. Her younger sister, Kalliope, is an actor and a gymnast. Even Mike the whippet, they all say, is getting accustomed to the camera.
But 2014 has taken things to a new level for her. "It's going crazily fast at the moment, so much has been jam-packed into this year," Angourie says. In May she went to the Cannes Film Festival for These Final Hours, Australian filmmaker Zak Hilditch's end-of-the-world drama in which she has a lead role as a young girl searching for her father and dealing with the prospect of the apocalypse.
This year she was also signed by a leading US agency, William Morris Endeavor. Recently, she taped an audition scene for The Nice Guys in the studio of her Australian agent, Catherine Poulton Management. She was asked to record a second audition, and then flown to Los Angeles for the final round.
The day that she arrived, she met producers, the director and the casting director and did a scene with Gosling. She had made up her mind, she says, not to expect anything from it. She had already done an international audition and had the experience of missing out. She told herself, "I'm going to fly to LA for three days and no one can take that away from me."
The following day, while she and Kate were riding bikes on the beach, the call came through to tell her that the role was hers. "All I said was, 'oh my goodness, oh my goodness'," says Angourie. "I was overwhelmed by what it would mean, for us as a family, and for school", not to mention missing dance performance, the school orchestra – "we have three really beautiful pieces I wanted to play" – and those Katy Perry tickets.
Angourie is calm and articulate. Her favourite actress is Emma Stone. She enjoys watching blockbuster movies and musicals and particularly likes films and TV shows that have a film-within-a film element in the plot – things like The Hunger Games, The Truman Show and Pleasantville. And she's very committed to her studies: she doesn't know how much acting she will do in years 11 and 12. In the meantime, she's ready for a certain amount of upheaval. The family is used to being flexible, says her mother, Kate. "We've moved a lot, and we take things as they come."
They now live in Melbourne, but have spent five years in Perth, and a year in Munich, where Angourie attended a local school and did her classes in German. Kate's new play, Monologue of A Murderer, based on her German research, opens at La Mama at the end of October, with Jeremy directing. A close friend of the Rices will travel to the US with Angourie for the first part of the shoot, Kate will come once the play opens, and the rest of the family a little later. Her school, Princes Hill High, is helping to organise a curriculum for her to study, and she will have a tutor on set.
And beyond The Nice Guys? Angourie laughs; she's taking it one month at a time, she says. "Next year I'll be in year 9, so I know we've got laptops, and we get to choose some of our own subjects. Year 9 is definitely a big step."
