Alix Wilton Regan, the new Lara Croft for the video games Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis and Tomb Raider: Catalyst (and the foreseeable Tomb Raider games if all goes well), put in quite the shift for her first stint as Lara. She entered full production for both games back-to-back, a couple of years after landing the role.
"I was cast [in August 2022] and it was maybe 2024, something like that, when we went into full production on both. Then I was like, this is big, whoa, this is really big. I didn't know immediately, but certainly for about two years now, I've been working on both projects simultaneously," Regan told Variety.
Despite filming both at the same time, Regan said she went in with a bit of a different approach for Catalyst. "I'm trying to make Lara in Atlantis feel ever so slightly younger and more wide-eyed and slightly more innocent than in Catalyst because, of course, if you think about it logically, it goes Atlantis and then all the other games, and then we go to Catalyst. So I'm trying to keep the "Atlantis" one just a little bit younger, a little bit more wide eyed; hasn't seen quite as much stuff, but she is very much a Lara who has lived through the Survivor trilogy," she said.
For her time as Lara, Regan has done a lot of research, and brings all sorts of influences in her portrayal. "There was a lot of inspiration taken from the first three Tomb Raiders, and then the Angelina Jolie films, because it's written with that kind of wit, that high level intelligence, that very dry sense of British humour. So there's a lot of inspiration that's been taken from all of those projects, whilst also paying close attention to what Camilla [Luddington] did with her Lara [in the Survivor trilogy], because that is the previous iteration of Lara."
Both Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis and Tomb Raider: Catalyst are scheduled to release in 2027.