Our First Look at Alicia Vikander Strapping on Bandages as Lara Croft While On Set For Tomb Raider

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On-set photos of Alicia Vikander wearing her Lara Croft digs for her upcoming star turn in the Tomb Raider movie have just started popping up, and so far, she bears a striking resemblance to the Lara Croft of the 2013 video game. Much like this upcoming movie, which intends to reboot a franchise originated by Angelina Jolie, the 2013 video game was also a reboot of the Tomb Raider gaming franchise that told an origin story about Lara’s roots.

At age 28, Alicia Vikander is still relatively young, but she already has a wealth of acting experience under her belt–not to mention an Academy Award. In this movie, she’ll actually be playing younger; Lara Croft was supposed to be only 21 years old in the 2013 game, and a new college graduate, still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Vikander could definitely pass for younger, so I doubt that will be an issue for her, and we know from her performances in movies like Ex Machina that she’s got the acting chops for the role. Above all, though, she’s got the movement skills necessarily for an action-centric role like Lara Croft.

As shown in the photos above, Alicia Vikander’s going to be doing some intense climbing, swinging, and self-bandaging in this movie–just like Lara Croft did in the 2013 Tomb Raider game, which involved her getting hurt a lot. Vikander is a former dancer who spent nine years in ballet school, and last year she explained that she planned to use her movement training in Tomb Raider. Based on how impressive her arms look in these photos, it appears as though she’s been doing a lot of weight-lifting to prep for the role as well–and she’ll need those muscles in order to do the acrobatic, demanding moves that we can see in these photos.

I’m surprised by how similar Vikander’s costume for Lara looks to the games. Even the bandages on her leg and arm mimic the exact same wounds that Lara ends up getting in the video game, suggesting that this movie will be a one-to-one reaction of the plot… barring a couple of very interesting changes, such as the casting of Daniel Wu. It’ll be interesting to see which parts of the game this movie chooses to recreate, and what ends up getting changed–but based on these photos, Lara Croft is definitely still going to be a bad-ass.

(via The Daily Mail, featured image via Bago Games/Flickr)

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Maddy Myers
Maddy Myers, journalist and arts critic, has written for the Boston Phoenix, Paste Magazine, MIT Technology Review, and tons more. She is a host on a videogame podcast called Isometric (relay.fm/isometric), and she plays the keytar in a band called the Robot Knights (robotknights.com).