An overachiever schemes and seduces to get into Harvard in ‘Honor Society’
After playing student reporter Betty Brant in three “Spider-Man” movies, Angourie Rice plays a character closer to herself in a film comedy upcoming on Paramount+.
In “Honor Society,” premiering Friday, July 29, the Australian actress is cast in the title role of Honor, an overachieving high school senior who will do whatever it takes to realize her goal of getting into Harvard. But first she must gain the coveted recommendation of her guidance counselor, Mr. Calvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, “Promising Young Woman”), which hinges on her acing her midterms and beating out three other candidates.
She identifies Michael (Gaten Matarazzo, “Stranger Things”) as her chief rival and launches a plan to undermine this classic nerd in braces by inviting him to study with her for the exams and turning on her own seductive charms to distract him. The only problem is, she finds herself falling for him.
For Rice, this represents her first starring role, which she jumped at because she felt she had common ground with Honor.
“I saw a portrait of myself reflected back at me and who I was in high school,” the 21-year-old actress says, laughing. “I was a very, very ambitious student, put a lot of pressure on myself to do really well at everything, and I saw that in Honor.
“But I think what I saw in Honor that really struck me,” she continues, “was how unashamed and unabashed she is of going after what she wants. She lets the audience in on her plan. She’s unashamed, that she will do whatever it takes to succeed and ... that’s something that I loved and that I wanted to play with.”
Rice also has high praise for Matarazzo, who she calls a gem and a pleasure to work with.
“What I loved about doing the scenes with him,” she explains, “is that there are so many layers to each scene that Honor and Michael have. There are layers of pretending, there are layers of ... saying one thing and meaning something else. There are so many levels to those scenes of pushing and pulling with different emotions. So it was so exciting to get to play around with that with Gaten because he became a really good friend of mine.”
After wrapping the two-month shoot earlier this year in Vancouver, Rice had to decompress from the intense schedule that demanded she be in every scene. But for her, remnants of Honor remain.
“I think with any character I play,” she says, “it’s going to happen that I end up carrying a little bit of that character with me – something that I’ve learned or something that I identify with. So I feel like it’s not really gone.”