Lara Croft is “adventurous.” She “hits hard.” She’s “slick,” “sleek,” “sexy,” and “proficient in dual-wielding pistols.” And the definition of all those qualities is something different to every player that has stepped into her boots over the last 30 years. So what does Lara Croft need to be to be Lara Croft?
It’s a question that comes up with each iteration of the franchise, and one Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft showrunner Tasha Huo confronted head-on, even if she wishes writing for and redesigning one of her favorite heroes for Netflix didn’t feel like navigating a trap-filled Tibetan temple.
“If is of course a very unique pressure, by the way: If I was animating Indiana Jones, we would not be having this conversation,” Huo says, correctly. Much internet space has been devoted to analyzing Lara as a character born out of a more sexualized era of female hero design, plenty of it considerate, but enough focused on bra size to make a sane person ugh.
“It was unfortunately something we had to think about,” the showrunner says. “But the answer is also very easy, which 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 started with Tomb Raider in 2013 and ended with Shadow of the Tomb Raider in 2018. But Huo, chasing her own curiosity, still wanted to make a show that explained how that grittier version of the character connected to the teal-tank-top classic version fans knew from the original games. “I really just wanted to tell the story of how she got there, this kind of in-between phase, this bridge between the Survivor and classic era,” Huo says.
Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft gets heavy. Lara is dealing with the relic-stealing legacy of her father, Richard Croft, and the death of her mentor, Conrad Roth. Actor Hayley Atwell, who voices Lara, gets plenty to chew on. Further enhancing that human dimension of the character was a conscious departure from any sense of Lara as a treasure-hunter. That was her father’s thing. A major thrust of the globetrotting first season is Lara working to protect antiquities, which Huo says is how she always experienced the early games in the first place.
“I think back about the games I used to play in the ’90s — I didn’t relish the stealing of artifacts,” she says. “The thing that I really remembered the most was how she kept them away from bad guys. That’s the same in the movies with Angelina Jolie. And so, to me, it wasn’t hard to have her be that person because that’s kind of who she always was to begin with.”
As a card-carrying history major, Huo also wanted to establish reality through the geographic and cultural catnip that made Lara’s quests in the games so rich. The showrunner fully admits that she is the type of player who would pore over every scribbled note, every reference book, every tomb engraving that would not just open up the lore of the games, but send her to Google to find answers about new mythologies and world cultures. “It took me hours and hours to finish these games,” she says. “But the thing that helps it creatively is that it makes the world feel full. It makes it feel real. It makes it feel lived in and true […] and that’s really a cool, exciting thing about what Lara Croft has always done for us. She’s always been to these crazy places that just make us curious.”
Then there’s the look of Lara. Huo lauds the Survivor games for starting the evolutionary process of making Lara badass, beautiful, and serious about her adventures, but says she did toil over the design with her team of artists. In the end, they devoted far more energy on the unique way their hero jumps and battles her way through supernatural encounters (“which is such a very particular and also, like, female way of moving,” she says) than her proportions.
“We all knew that this was going to be someone who was real, someone we could relate to, and someone who still had strength and power — all the things that she always had.”
Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft premieres on Oct. 10.
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