Like most people born in the ’90s and early 2000s, Australian actor Angourie Rice loved the movie Mean Girls when she was growing up. The Tina Fey-penned comedy was on such frequent rotation that the 23-year-old has most of the lines committed to memory. 

So when it was revealed that Fey was working on an updated version—a movie-musical starring actor-singer Reneé Rapp, Moana’s Auli’i Cravalho, Busy Philipps and Jon Hamm—based on the 2018 Broadway production, Rice was both excited and nervous. “My first question was ‘How are they going to do this?’” she says. “I was lucky enough to have a call with Tina, who answered all my questions—

I saw her vision.” But Rice, whose past roles include HBO’s Mare of Easttown opposite Kate Winslet and Apple TV+ miniseries The Last Thing He Told Me with Jennifer Garner, had zero musical experience and still wasn’t sure about stepping into the shoes of Cady Heron, the role originated by Lindsay Lohan. “I really wanted to think about it because it’s a huge responsibility

I was scared of what people would say,” she says about the new Mean Girls, which premiered earlier this year. “Then I thought about how I would feel if someone else played the role. I thought about how I would feel if I went to the cinema and saw it and went, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe I didn’t do it.’ I realized that this meant a lot to me and that fear doesn’t mean anything.”