Lara Croft is “adventurous.” She “hits hard.” She’s “sleek,” “tight,” “sexy,” and “skilled in the dual wielding of pistols.” And the definition of each of those qualities has changed for every player who’s stepped into her shoes over the past 30 years. So what does Lara Croft need to be Lara Croft?
It’s a question that comes up with every iteration of the franchise, and one Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft Showrunner Tasha Huo pushed back, even though she wishes writing for and redesigning one of her favorite heroes for Netflix didn’t feel like navigating a Tibetan temple full of pitfalls.
“It’s a very unique pressure, of course, and by the way, if I were animating Indiana Jones, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Huo rightly says. A lot of internet space is dedicated to analyzing Lara as a character born out of a more sexualized era of female hero design, much of it is thoughtful, but enough focused on bra size to make a healthy person Bah.
“It was something we had to think about, unfortunately,” the showrunner says. “But the answer is also very easy, and that is: make her realistic.”
Most of the drama in Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft takes place shortly after the events of the Survivor trilogy of games, which began with Grave robber in 2013 and ended with Shadow of the Tomb Raider in 2018. But Huo, pursuing her own curiosity, still wanted to make a show that explained how that grittier version of the character connected to the classic, blue-tank-topped version fans knew from the original games. “I really just wanted to tell the story of how she got there, this sort of in-between, this bridge between Survivor and the classic era,” Huo says.
Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft gets heavy. Lara is dealing with the legacy of her relic-stealing father, Richard Croft, and the death of her mentor, Conrad Roth. Actor Hayley Atwell, who voices Lara, is given plenty to think about. That human dimension to the character was further enhanced by a deliberate departure from the idea that Lara was a treasure hunter. That was her father’s thing. A major thrust of the world-traveling first season is that Lara is working to protect antiquities, which Huo says was how she initially experienced the early games.
“I think back to the games I played in the ’90s — I didn’t like stealing artifacts,” she says. “What I remember most is how she kept them away from the bad guys. That’s the same in the Angelina Jolie movies. And so it wasn’t hard for me to let her be that person, because that’s kind of who she always was.”
As a student of history, Huo also wanted to capture reality through the geographical and cultural catnip that made Lara’s quests in the games so rich. The showrunner fully admits that she’s the kind of player who would pore over every scribbled note, every reference book, every tombstone engraving that would not only reveal the lore of the games but also send her to Google for answers about new mythologies and world cultures. “It took me hours and hours to finish these games,” she says. “But what it helps creatively is that it makes the world feel full. It makes it feel real. It makes it feel alive and real (…) and that’s a really cool, exciting thing about what Lara Croft has always done for us. She’s always been in these crazy places that just make us curious.”
Then there’s Lara’s look. Huo credits the Survivor games for starting the evolutionary process of making Lara tough, beautiful, and serious about her adventures, but says she worked hard on the design with her team of artists. Ultimately, they put far more effort into the unique way their hero jumps and fights through supernatural encounters (“which is such a unique and also, like, feminine way of moving,” she says) than into her proportions.
“We all knew this would be someone who was real, someone we could relate to, and someone who still had strength and power – all those things that she always had.”
Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft will premiere on October 10th.