Animated adventure

ANIMATED action television series Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft is out now on Netflix.

Based on the 1996 Tomb Raider video game series, the show follows intelligent and athletic archaeologist Lara Croft who travels the world in search of lost artefacts and exploring dangerous tombs and ruins.

The eight episodes will be set in the same universe as the 2013 video game reboot trilogy and take place after the events of 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Showrunner Tasha Huo, a lover of the franchise, revealed in an interview that fans can expect the animated show to fill gaps that were not explored in the video games, such as Lara’s backstory and relationships.

“I feel like, in playing the games, you miss a whole section of Lara’s life, which is: what is it like beyond the tombs? What are her relationships like? I was always so curious when Lara could call up a friend in the middle of nowhere in Thailand. How did she meet that person,” Tasha said.

“The show gets to explore how she made these relationships and the origin story of a lot of her life that we just take for granted when we meet her in those 90’s games,” she added.

Marvel star Hayley Atwell will be voicing the protagonist Lara, who Tasha described as the ‘perfect encapsulation of Lara’, as she was filming for the blockbuster franchise Mission Impossible the same time she was recording for the series.

“It was a lot of, ‘Oh, I did that stunt last week, so I know exactly what that sounds like’.

“Hayley, herself, is a natural adventurer, while also being just an incredible dramatic actress. So she is the perfect encapsulation of Lara during this sort of bridge period of time,” Tasha added.

Earl Baylon will also be reprising his role from the video game trilogy as Jonah Maiava, alongside Allen Maldonado who voices Lara’s tech expert Zip, a character whose last appearance in the franchise was in the 2008 game Tomb Raider: Underworld.