After Shadow of the Tomb Raider, an animated Lara Croft had to laugh, cry, and wrestle like a pro

Since her first tomb-raiding adventure nearly 30 years ago, Lara Croft has trotted the entire globe in pursuit of artifacts and international threats. So where does one even begin crafting a new Tomb Raider story, told entirely in unplayable animation? Showrunner Tasha Huo had a vision — and Netflix bought in. 

“Obviously you can start anywhere,” Huo tells Polygon. “Ultimately I knew I wanted to arc her into classic Lara, so she needed to start at a low point. Off the heels of Shadow of the Tomb Raider felt like an obvious starting point, and then grow her from there.”

Shadow wrapped up the Tomb Raider “Survivor” trilogy, which saw a young Lara, fresh out of archeology school, follow in the footsteps of her relic-hunting father, only to face violence, harsh environments, and deaths that would linger far beyond one game. Huo wanted to pick back up with that version of Lara, and use the Netflix series to chart the path to the point on the timeline where fans of the original 1990s games met her — as a total ace with dual pistols. But a setting is only part of the equation, and to find an adventure worthy of Lara’s raider prowess, Huo turned to her own passion.

“I’ve been wanting to write something in the world of Chinese mythology for a very long time, being half Chinese,” she says. Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft certainly goes there; no spoilers, but while the show maintains a bit of the Survivor-era grit early on, eloquent pacing and a balance of reality allow Huo to open the show up to supernatural possibilities, and the kind of mythological spectacle that’s right in the wheelhouse of Powerhouse Animation, the studio behind Castlevania and Blood of Zeus. 

“As I started to look into some of these mythologies, it’s cool how you can really spread it all over the world, since the Chinese actually traveled all over the world. There are signs of Chinese pottery in places you would never imagine, and so that suddenly opened up the world even more. We could really put Lara anywhere and follow this kind of Chinese myth, which just also felt completely appropriate to Lara, who is always jetsetting someplace new every episode.”

Following Shadow of the Tomb Raider with a purely animated series also granted Huo permission to take a second away from the action and explore Lara’s human side. “When you’re playing a game, you’re always in the climax, you’re sort of always in danger. And I wanted to see what Lara was doing when she wasn’t in danger. In the quiet moments, how was she dealing with those things?”

Mainly, Huo wanted to see her hanging out with friends. Jonah, from the Survivor trilogy, plays a major role in the show, and actors Hayley Atwell and Earl Baylon find quick rapport as Lara and her New Zealander bestie. “I love Jonah, personally,” Huo says, “and there’s something about their friendship which I feel like hadn’t quite yet been resolved. So it was nice to get to explore him in season 1. He is always the voice of reason when Lara has big crazy ideas of how she wants to deal with things. He is more down to earth and also comes from a place of heart and empathy, all things that Lara herself needs to learn. So he became this great emotional foil for her in season 1 to kind of guide her in those sort of emotional ways of how you should behave and think about things — think through things before you act, Lara!”

Over however many seasons Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft run on Netflix — and Huo hopes it’s many — the showrunner hopes to find all the “missing pieces” from the games: where Lara found her confidence, her independence, her humor. If that sounds heady, good news: She also wants to see Lara pound adversaries to the ground. 

“I watched a lot of monks doing martial arts, and a lot of wrestling,” Huo says with a particular giddiness.

Huo is a major wrestling fan, and she saw the animated series as the opportunity to let Lara bust up big dudes with crushing power. There is at least one suplex in season 1 of Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft.

“I feel like those are moves that Lara also has in her repertoire because she was a bouncer,” Huo says. “There’s a brawler inside of her, but there’s also a gymnast inside of her. So those two things combined, that’s kind of an action style I’ve never seen before, and is so uniquely Lara — uniquely feminine. When you watch female wrestlers, there is sort of an elegance as well as a brutality to how they fight, which is definitely who Lara is.”

Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft premieres on Netflix on Oct. 10.