The news landed with a quiet significance that felt entirely deliberate. Sophie Turner, an actress who built a career portraying the evolution of a woman’s strength from quiet suffering to steely command, is to be the next Lara Croft. More telling, perhaps, is the name attached as showrunner: Phoebe Waller-Bridge, a writer who has made a profound art of dismantling female archetypes with surgical wit and psychological acuity. This isn’t just another casting announcement. It’s a statement of intent. It is the latest chapter in the strange, revealing story of a character who has served as a cultural barometer for nearly thirty years.
Lara Croft is more than a video game protagonist. She is a concept, an avatar for our shifting ideas about female power, intelligence, and physicality. Each woman who has stepped into her boots has done more than play a role; they have reflected the cultural moment they inhabited. To trace her lineage is to trace our own evolving expectations of a female hero.
The Fantasy Made Flesh
Before Hollywood took notice, Lara Croft existed in the real world as a promotional tool. She was a marketing concept brought to life. In the late 1990s, models like Natalie Cook and Rhona Mitra were hired to embody the character at trade shows and for magazine shoots. Their purpose was direct: to be a living translation of the pixelated, impossibly proportioned figure from the original Tomb Raider game.
This was an era of uncomplicated fantasy. The models were chosen for their resemblance to a male-gaze ideal – a vision of female strength that was inextricably linked to overt sexuality. Rhona Mitra, who would go on to a successful acting career, found that this early role defined her public persona with an intensity that her later film work never quite matched. She once recounted receiving a letter from a dozen young men who, as a group, proposed marriage, complete with a weekly rota for sharing her affections. It’s a curious, almost quaint anecdote now, but it speaks volumes about the character’s initial function. She wasn’t a person; she was an object of collective fandom, a pin-up with a pistol.
The Bulletproof Superstar
When the first film adaptation arrived in 2001, it needed more than a lookalike. It needed a star with enough gravitational pull to carry a blockbuster. It found one in Angelina Jolie. At the turn of the millennium, Jolie was a cultural force – an actress defined by a cool, almost dangerous charisma. Her Lara Croft was the fantasy perfected.
She was untouchable, preternaturally confident, and utterly in control. Leaping through crumbling temples or engaging in slick, choreographed gun-fu, Jolie’s Croft was less an archaeologist and more a superhero. This was a direct reflection of the early 2000s action aesthetic, a post-Matrix world of leather-clad invincibility. The casting of her own father, Jon Voight, as Lord Croft added a layer of meta-narrative, blurring the lines between actress and character. The film was a huge success, setting records for a female-led picture and solidifying Lara Croft as a global phenomenon.
But the fantasy had its limits. The 2003 sequel, The Cradle of Life, despite being a technically better film, failed to capture the same commercial energy. Jolie, sensing the character had nowhere left to go, declined to return for a third instalment. Her version of Lara was complete, a perfect, polished product of its time. For fifteen years, that was where the story ended.
The Gritty Realist
The world was a different place when Lara Croft returned to the screen in 2018. The appetite for invincible heroes had waned, replaced by a demand for grit, vulnerability, and realism. We were in the era of the origin story, where audiences wanted to see their icons bleed. Into this landscape stepped Alicia Vikander.
The choice of the Swedish actress, an Oscar winner known for her dramatic intensity, was the first signal that this Tomb Raider would be a different beast. Vikander’s Croft was not a master of her craft. She was a novice, a bike courier struggling to find her place in the world. When she was thrown into danger, she was terrified. She got hurt. She made mistakes. Her first kill was not a moment of cool triumph, but a desperate, traumatic act of survival. This was a character forged in pain, not born from perfection. In a sense, her journey was like that of a deep-sea diver learning to withstand immense pressure; her strength was earned, not assumed.
Of course, this radical reinvention was met with resistance. A vocal minority of online critics launched a digital firestorm, their complaints focused, with a grim predictability, on Vikander’s physique. They argued she wasn’t “sexy” enough, that her body didn’t conform to the exaggerated dimensions of the video game character they held dear. This backlash was perhaps the most revealing moment in the character’s history. It exposed the fault line between those who saw Lara Croft as a fantasy object and those ready to embrace her as a complex human being. The film performed modestly, and the planned sequel never materialised, leaving this grounded, compelling version of the character stranded.
The Psychological Architect
And so we arrive at today, and the prospect of Sophie Turner guided by the mind of Phoebe Waller-Bridge. This pairing feels less like a continuation and more like a revolution. Turner’s career-defining role as Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones was a long, slow study in the forging of resilience. She knows how to portray a woman who finds strength not in physical prowess alone, but in intelligence, patience, and a deep understanding of the broken world around her.
The involvement of Waller-Bridge, however, is the masterstroke. Her work, particularly Fleabag, is celebrated for its ability to find the profound humanity, and the dark humour, within female pain and anger. She is an expert at looking at an established trope – the grieving woman, the female spy – and rebuilding it from the inside out, exposing all its messy, contradictory, and fascinating wiring.
What might a Lara Croft born of this collaboration look like? One can imagine a character driven by a fierce, complicated intelligence, her adventures in forgotten tombs serving as a metaphor for a deeper, more personal excavation. The physical challenges will undoubtedly be there, but they may be secondary to the psychological ones. Waller-Bridge’s influence suggests a Lara who is witty, self-aware, and perhaps a little broken – a hero whose greatest asset is not her agility, but her mind.
The journey of Lara Croft has been a remarkable one: from a silent promotional model to a bulletproof action hero, from a battered survivor to, now, a potential subject for a complex character study. Each iteration has been a mirror, reflecting our own cultural progress and prejudices. We have demanded, in turn, that she be a fantasy, a fighter, and a human being. Now, it seems, we are ready to ask her to be something more: a mind we can explore, not just a body to be watched. The raiding of tombs may be about to get far more interesting.
