We’re about to see Phoebe Waller-Bridge (pictured above) tackle some big, action-packed stunts in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. It turns out that the Fleabag creator is currently working on a live-action Lara Croft television series for Amazon, and she has some specific ideas about what she, a diehard fan of the character from the Tomb Raider video games, wants to do with it.
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“God, it literally felt like that teenager in me saying: Do right by her, do right by Lara!” Waller-Bridge told Vanity Fair. “The opportunity to have, as we were talking earlier, a female action character…. Having worked on Bond and having worked as an actor on Indy, I feel like I’ve been building up to this. What if I could take the reins on an action franchise, with everything I’ve learned, with a character I adore, and also just bring back some of that ’90s vibe?”
Waller-Bridge, who played the Lara Croft games fervently as a teen, said she was excited to take on a series adaptation because, among other things, Lara “had an attitude. She was very deliberate in what she wanted to do.”
“I feel like when you’re working in the industry, you’ve got to ride the waves and lean in,” she added later on. “There’s room to do something really quite dangerous. And if I can do something dangerous and exciting with Tomb Raider, I already have an audience of people who love Lara and hopefully will continue to. And that is a very unusual position to be in. It’s the old Trojan horse.”
Waller-Bridge and her writers’ room’s work on Tomb Raider has been on hold with the writers’ strike, so it’s unclear if/when we’ll see her vision of Lara on-screen. One thing she did say though, is that she didn’t like how the video games shifted when the powers that be “realized that they could market [Lara] to be a sex symbol,” and that, perhaps relatedly, there was discussion with her writers about how much the TV show’s Lara should resemble the video game version. “She’s a tomb raider, so she’s incredibly fit,” Waller-Bridge said. “She has to squeeze through tiny rock crevices all the time. It is a different experience squeezing through a small rock crevice when you have larger boobs than if you have smaller boobs.”
No news of if/when Tomb Raider will come out on Prime Video. In the meantime, you can see Waller-Bridge as Indy’s goddaughter, Helena, when Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny comes out on June 30, 2023.
