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 When
Paramount announced back in 2000 that it had chosen Hollywood
stunner Angelina Jolie to bring to life video game heroine Lara Croft,
Tomb Raider fans agreed that it was a match made in heaven. With her
sense of adventure, looks that could kill and a body that can both
seduce and kick some ass, Jolie isn’t just a Lara Croft look-alike— she
is Lara Croft. But oddly enough, it took fans of the video game to
convince the 27-year-old what they knew all along. "I didn't accept me
in the role at first," Jolie recalls. "But the studio polled people and
fans were happy to see me in the role, they accepted that, so it made me
happy. Really there isn't that much that's so different from us, I
suppose. Certainly I do love adventure; I love other countries and other
cultures. I love to fight for something I care about. Plus I think she's
a very good friend with the guy she lives with and I think I am to
people close to me."
As much as Jolie has in common with the role many consider to be
the part she was born to play, similar to most video-game-turned-movies,
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider opened up at the box office to some
overwhelmingly bad reviews. Nevertheless, audiences ran to theaters to
see Jolie play Lara Croft, and the film raked in over $131 million in
the U.S. alone. Gross aside, Jolie knew that something bigger and better
could be done with the budding franchise, and her answers to some of the
problems critics and Tomb Raider fans alike discussed after the 2001
summer hit are addressed in this summer's sequel, Lara Croft Tomb
Raider: The Cradle of Life.
 In
The Cradle of Life, Lara Croft is on a quest to save Pandora's Box,
a journey that took Jolie to a variety of places including Greece,
England, Hong Kong and Kenya. Besides more exotic filming locations,
Jolie promises that The Cradle of Life will have a more realistic feel
to it and take place in less of a video game fantasy world. She also
says that Lara will take on a transition of her own, becoming less of a
cartoon character and far more athletic, darker and sexier in the
process. "I think she's changed," Jolie states. "I haven't seen the
film— I don't know what they've cut— but I think she's changed in that
we're just able to see more of her. I think that was missing in the last
one. A lot of people felt that they wanted to be more inside her world
as opposed to curious about her. We took that seriously and we said that
there are things that maybe she loved, things that she fears or things
that make her laugh. We've just made her more human or more accessible—
you're just more inside this time. I think there's probably still room
even more to grow about what you can do with her. Even I still don't
know completely who she is."UB
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