Sophie Turner, best known for her roles as Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones and Jean Grey in X-Men: Dark Phoenix, is the new Lara Croft for the streaming adaptation of Tomb Raider. Amazon MGM Studios revealed a first look at the actor in costume and, yup, I think she nailed it.
Does that mean the show itself will be any good? Who knows. But it should help limit any skepticism about whether Turner is cut out to take over the English archeologist who moonlights as a puzzle-solving treasure hunter. The role was previously played by Angelina Jolie in the early 2000s and later by Alicia Vikander in the 2018 reboot. Here’s the first photo of Turner in costume, which essentially recreates Croft’s look from the 1996 game beat-for-beat:
The show has already started filming but we still don’t know what the live-action adaptation, helmed by Fleabag‘s Phoebe Waller-Bridge, will entail. Jason Isaacs will play Croft’s Uncle, Atlas DeMornay, while Martin Bobb-Semple plays Croft’s side-kick, Zip. Bill Paterson, meanwhile, will play her butler. Celina Imrie is also onboard as a museum curator while Sigourney Weaver plays someone “keen to exploit Lara’s talents,” according to Amazon.
There’s no release date for the show yet, but given the production schedule I wouldn’t be surprised to see it pop up sometime in 2027. It follows Amazon’s success in spinning another hit game franchise, Fallout, into a streaming hit, and is part of Hollywood’s broader goldrush to exploit gaming IP instead of creating new ideas. It couldn’t be coming at a better time for the franchise, though.
A reboot of the 1996 game called Tomb Raider Atlantis will launch later this year, followed by the next sequel sometime in the years ahead. That game has been in production for a while. The last new entry was Shadow of the Tomb Raider back in 2018.