How Netflix’s New Tomb Raider Series Evolved Lara Croft

This episode of Does it Fly? is presented by Netflix, the exclusive home of Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft, starring Hayley Atwell, Allen Maldonado, Earl Baylon, Richard Armitage, and Zoe Boyle. Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft is now streaming only on Netflix.

It’s time for another special Does it Fly? episode! Every now and then the DiF team gets to go behind-the-scenes on an exciting new movie or TV series and talk to the folks who make the concept fly.

This time around, our amazing co-host, Tamara Krinsky, speaks with Tasha Huo, showrunner and executive producer of Netflix’s brand new anime, Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft. And while the character of Lara Croft is an iconic name in adventure, she’s had something of a checkered history on screen (some of which we covered in a recent episode). But all of that changes with this new series, which fleshes out Lara’s backstory and fills in the blanks of the stories told in the games in lushly animated fashion. Did we mention that it features the brilliant Hayley Atwell voicing Lara?

Join us for all the exciting details on Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft right here or on our YouTube page! 

WARNING: MILD SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW FOLLOW!

THE SCIENCE

What kind of research did you do when putting this show together? 

I have a degree in history, so the history of it was actually very, very important to me. Everything that you're going to see in the show is somehow based in some kind of history, whether it's mythology or the history behind a certain relic. I love deep diving. It involved a lot of original source material. With some of the Tomb Raider games you can tell they did their research. I wanted to make sure that there was something that fans could sink their teeth into, where you watch something and you think, “is this real? I'm gonna Google this.” And sure enough, yes, it's real, and you can go down your own rabbit hole and figure out what exactly Lara was going after.

Can you share one of your favorite things you found that you were doing on one of those deep dives?

I'm half Chinese, so I really enjoyed getting to dig into a lot of the history and mythology that I didn't learn in school, to be totally honest. Some of the fun stuff would just be the nuance of the relics themselves, the history behind them, and how there's actually poetry written about what these objects were and how dangerous they could be. Also the history of the gods. I sort of feel like when I learned about Chinese history, we were told that they didn't really have gods. That’s not actually true. The finale takes place basically in the Mount Olympus of China. And getting to deep dive into what that religion was like, what the mythology was like, was really, really fun.

THE STORY

As a creator, what was necessary for this show to make it fly? For fans, there's such a history here. What were the things that you knew had to be in the show.

There's so much. I think a lot of it is Lara’s abilities and her personality. The thing that I remember I had all the way from the beginning of my pitch was this is a woman who, no matter what happens, picks herself back up. I think that was always just the guiding force to anything that ever happened to her. No matter what she's going to find a way. And, of course, we have to have weapons, we have to have her ability to fight, all of these things that you see that she's so skilled at in the games, you absolutely want to bring that here, and all of the Easter eggs as well.

There were obviously things that you needed to keep from the canon of the games, but I'm curious about what you changed.

I'm a fan of Lara Croft because of the video games. I want to make sure that she's the Lara Croft that we recognize. So really, what the show is, it's sort of a bridge between the Survivor series of games, which started in 2013. Those showed the origin story of Lara Croft. It's Lara as a college student who has never killed anyone, has never seen a dead body, and is just surviving. That's how she gets through those games. Then we have the earlier games, and the Angelina Jolie movies, for example, where it's someone who is supremely confident in what she does, because she's been through numerous adventures that we're never even going to see, which is part of the fun of it. They're just sort of hinted at. So this show is really the bridge between that young woman who's trying to figure herself out to that woman who has figured herself out. 

THE VIBE

What was it that you could do in animation that is different from a video game, or different from live action? How did you play with that as a creator?

I think some of the fun of the animated series was getting to see Lara sort of “behind the scenes” of the video game. Because when you're playing the video game, she's always “on” and when you're in a show…you can see what it’s like to see Lara Croft do an everyday thing, and that's very interesting to me. 

The best way to relate to Lara is to see how she relates to other people, and they are such a huge help for her. Over the course of the games, you meet so many different people who clearly have a history with Lara. So the show is really about, how did those relationships form? How did she create this team around her? Some of the fun of the games is that she can call upon a Navy SEAL that she apparently knew years ago. Well, how did she know that Navy SEAL? Let's do this in the show. Let's find out what that relationship was like, and dive deeper into the psychology of what makes Lara Croft. One of the cool things is we get to see her discover some things about her history that she didn't know…I don’t want to give too much away, but things like that, for me, provided such texture and layers. 

Do you want more interview episodes of Does it Fly? where your favorite creatives tell us HOW they make your favorite sci-fi, horror, and fantasy projects work? If so, drop us a line in the comments or on our socials!

WANT MORE FROM DOES IT FLY?

We recently spoke to the creator of Netflix’s amazing new anime series Terminator Zero. Check it out here!

Lara Croft isn’t the only tomb raiding screen hero we’ve investigated on Does it Fly?. Check out our episode on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom!

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