You can watch episode 6 of Voice Over Histories (The Voice Actresses of Tomb Raider Lara Croft) here! The transcript of the episode is below (without transcription of footage of interviews/clips that feature in the episode).
Transcript of The Voice Actresses Behind Tomb Raider, Lara Croft
Welcome back to Voice Over Histories! This is episode 6 and I’m Katie Aitken. In this docu-series, we’re shining a light on the people, the projects and the stories from the voice over industry of times past.
Today we’re delving into the history, the multiple voice actresses and the evolution of a particular character. Voted the most iconic video game character of all time, join me in discovering the many voices of - Tomb Raider, Lara Croft.
The evolution of Lara Croft over the years
Lara Croft has been at the forefront of pop culture for nearly 3 decades now and has been quite the dichotomous reference point throughout. On the one hand, although not the first female protagonist in a game, she was groundbreaking nonetheless for taking the lead in an action adventure video game. Being athletic, sharp witted, fearless, exciting and intelligent all primed her for being a symbol of feminism.
On the other hand, she has had plenty of critics over the years who have regarded her as little more than a cyber sex symbol, an objectified figure, and certainly no role model.
The evolution that both Lara Croft as a character and Tomb Raider in the wider sense have gone through over the decades is one quite unlike any other gaming franchise.
If you happen to be watching this Voice Over Histories episode on the day of its release, you may have noticed that it coincides with the Netflix release of ‘Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft’. This is the latest iteration of Lara in animation form, which also drops today. In this series, voice actress Hayley Atwell will be taking on the role of Lara Croft.
Interestingly, this animation will be continuing on from the games, rather than an adaptation of them. The excitement for fans therefore lies in discovering a fresh chapter of Lara’s story, rather than being made to retread already covered ground.
Thanks to Tomb Raider’s popularity spanning nearly 30 years, undergoing multiple reboots and restarted timelines in the games as well as appearing in various mediums outside of games, including animations, live action films and comics, fans have witnessed Lara Croft at different stages of her own personal story, as well as her wider, culturally significant evolution. Her voice has been a notable aspect of that evolution as well as a core part of her character. And a fair few voice actresses have held the mantle of ‘voice of Lara Croft’ over the years.
So let’s go back to where it all started. Core Design Limited was a small, British video game developer. When they decided to make Tomb Raider back in the mid 90s, there were two huge, groundbreaking ideas that they had. The first was to make a 3D game environment. Something they had never done before and very few other developers at the time had. The second was to have a female character at the helm. Both the gaming industry and the audience were particularly male dominated at the time so making male gamers play as a woman was practically a radical idea.
After playing around with numerous different character ideas, they finally settled on Lara Cruz.
She was everything that Lara Croft became - an expert in antiquities with Olympian standard athletic strength and skills, with a long plait and hot pants, except South American. But the powers that be (who was publisher, Eidos) wanted a more typical, British name.
A final vote between Core Design’s 6 person team selected Lara Croft.
She was introduced to the world in the release of Tomb Raider 1 in 1996. Shelley Blond was the very first actress to provide Lara Croft a voice. In an interview, Blond recalled being told by her agent that Core Design and Eidos had already been looking for a voice for 9 months by the time she received the audition lines.
She scored the job. Here she is at Comic Con in St Albans in 2019, recalling the actual recording session.
In other interviews, she said that the directions she was given for voicing Lara was,
“They told me they wanted her to sound like a young female Bond. Very monotonous without much emotion.”
On it’s release, the game far surpassed anyone’s expectations. The then president and CEO of Eidos, Ian Livingstone, recollected,
“we put a number in the budget of 100,000 units being sold. Little did we know that the first Tomb Raider would go on to sell over seven million units!”
Lara Croft was appearing everywhere - from the front cover of gaming magazines to business newspapers to an 8 page cover article in Europe’s top fashion magazine, The Face, solidifying her catapulted presence to iconic status.
The second game went into production immediately and was released the very next year. But Blond was contracted elsewhere and was unable to return so Judith Gibbins stepped in and became the second voice of Lara Croft.
Gibbins managed to get the role, in part thanks to her brother who worked at Core Design. She is known for bringing more of a depth and maturity to the role. Interestingly, although they changed voice over artists, sound clips from Shelley Blond and Heather Gibson (who was in fact one of Core Design’s level designers) still provided some of the numerous sound effects that Lara made across the next couple of games.
In the build up to the release of Tomb Raider 2, the “Where The Boys Are” ad campaign still firmly showed that male gamers were their target audience.
Due to the way Tomb Raider, and Lara in particular was being marketed, Toby Gard, the creator of Lara decided to leave Core Design. He felt like he had lost creative control of his creation. Eidos were marketing Lara in a very different way to how he or the rest of the Core Design team envisioned her character.
As a result of Lara’s amped up sex appeal marketing method, a myth that persisted at the time of Tomb Raider 2 was that there were nude cheat codes, to see Lara in all her pixelated, pointy glory.
Core Design made efforts to try to protect her from explicit objectification.
In fact, if gamers did enter the rumoured cheat code, this is what would happen… (clip of Lara Croft exploding in the game).
And as a further response to the nudity requests, at the end of Tomb Raider 2, they added a shower scene where Lara shoots the player for trying to take a peek.
Core Design, Eidos and Lara Croft’s star continued to rise, with Tomb Raider 2 outselling Tomb Raider 1. Gibbins played Lara in Tomb Raider 2 and Tomb Raider 3, coming out in 1997 and 1998 respectively.
Although Judith Gibbins was credited in the games, her appearances at conventions was restricted for a time, with Lara Croft digitally appearing at them instead and Gibbons remaining hidden backstage with an earpiece, answering questions from fans as Lara.
Gibbin’s recalled attending E3 in Atlanta to promote Tomb Raider 3 in 1998,
“I called it my time in a cupboard. I have to say, a lot of the time I had silly questions, for example, ‘What size are your breasts?’”
Despite the daft questions, she remembers moments like this, being able to play Lara Croft on the fly and interacting with fans as one of her most enjoyable parts of the role.
Then, for a 4th consecutive year, the 4th installment of the game, Tomb Raider, The Last Revelation was released in 1999. In this game, the mantle of voice of Lara Croft was passed on to Jonell Elliott.
Elliott said,
“I played her with that strong, gregarious and tough attitude. Bold and adventurous as ever, and then later introducing young Lara - sweet and sassy but totally fearless. It was a dream come true to play the two parts of her character.”
A popular theory as to why Jonell Elliot took over from Judith Gibbins was that Gibbin’s couldn’t vocally sound like a child, which was obviously needed for this 4th game. This was the first game in which players had more of an insight into Lara’s history.
At this point, the developers at Core Design were experiencing extreme fatigue, having pumped out game after game each year for four years. So they killed Lara at the end of The Last Revelation. Eidos was not happy about this turn of events and another game, Tomb Raider: Chronicles came out in 2000.
This game was a soft reboot of the series, shaking up the structure of the storytelling. It centred around Lara’s funeral and the gameplay visited Lara across different adventures throughout her life. Elliott remained as the voice of Lara during what were rather turbulent times for the game.
However, Lara’s star appeared to keep rising as she hit Hollywood! In 2001, Tomb Raider the movie came out with Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft. The movie was a huge hit and for a long time, held the title of highest grossing video game adaptation.
The next game, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, came out in 2003, coinciding with the new technology of the time…
Lara underwent a change in wardrobe, exchanging her classic tank top and shorts for the grungier denim, leather and sunglasses look. The overall vibe of the game was much darker. From a character performance perspective, Elliott said that Lara,
“...had been through a transition which called for her to be mistrustful, edgier, colder and more detached. It was an exciting time for me to play her as she took on a new facade. I think as an actor, it’s really interesting to play the more complex characters and it added a new depth to Lara.”
The release of the game somewhat marked the end of an era as the Tomb Raider games were about to go through their biggest shift, both behind the scenes and in the games.
The Core Design team had long been creatively and physically depleted by this point, having created a revolutionary character and an iconic franchise, working continuously over the past seven years. There was a swelling dissatisfaction amongst players, developers and stakeholders, which led to Eidos making the decision to take Tomb Raider from Core Design and put it in the hands of Crystal Dynamics, an American company.
The next Tomb Raider game was a reboot, the first game of the Crystal Dynamics era, Tomb Raider: Legend in 2006. Crystal Dynamics had to decide which aspects of Lara they wanted to keep and which they could change or expand upon, leaving their own mark.
They kept things like Lara’s intellect and aspects of her iconography like her dual pistols. But changed things like the combat system, making it far more fluid and enhancing acrobatic abilities. Another key thing that changed at this point was Lara’s voice actress.
For the first time in the games, the voice actress to take over voicing Lara Croft was an established on screen actress. Keeley Hawes. She recalls,
“I was contracted to do one game but they were happy with the result and it went from there.”
Hawes remained as the voice of Lara Croft for Tomb Raider: Anniversary in 2007 and Tomb Raider: Underworld in 2008 as well as the arcade games, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light in 2010 and The Temple of Osiris in 2014.
In 2007, as well as Tomb Raider: Anniversary’s release Lara Croft also made an appearance in animated form. Long before Netflix conceived an animated Lara Croft, she had 10 short animated adventures in ReVisioned: Tomb Raider that were available on GameTap.com. Each episode was written and designed by an impressive list of different writers and artists who had the freedom to put their own take on the character and where they took her story.
In this 10 episode series, another well known name stepped in to be the voice of Lara - Minnie Driver. GameTap’s vice president of content and creative director, Ricardo Sanchez, said.
“...the name that just popped out for me, for a lot of reasons, was Minnie Driver. She is a spectacular actress. She’s done a lot of animation work before. And she has this fantastic, strong voice, that when you hear her as Lara Croft, it just really works.”
The game, Tomb Raider: Underworld in 2008 marked the end of a trilogy. The team was getting feedback that Lara as a character didn’t feel very fresh and Crystal Dynamics knew that whatever came afterwards would need a significant shift. An origin story made the most sense.
So the games saw another reboot, with the game simply called Tomb Raider in 2013. This took Lara Croft back to being 21 years old, more vulnerable, more naive and being pushed to her limits. For this, they needed a new voice actress again to reflect the more youthful version of Lara. Another actress known for her TV roles was selected - Camilla Luddington stepped into the role.
At this point, Crystal Dynamics’ focus was to recreate the relationship between Lara and the players, making her an altogether more relatable character. This was reflected in her story arc, her more realistic body type and of course, her vocal performance and delivery.
Luddington had a naturally more youthful voice that fit 21 year old Lara better than Hawes. And she played her lines with less of the assurance and dominant deliveries that Lara had traditionally possessed.
Luddington’s delivery also created a less aristocratic, less RP Lara due to her own accent. Despite Luddington being born in the UK, she moved to the US when she was young. As a result, her version of Lara has a more transatlantic twang to it and uses more Americanisms than previously seen (little things like referring to an ‘elevator’ instead of a ‘lift’.) Whether Luddington’s different accent for Lara was intentional and meant to reflect a change in how players may perceive her has not been particularly documented.
The reboot of Tomb Raider went on to have massive success, being the biggest selling of all the games to date. Luddington remained as Lara’s voice and motion capture artist for the next 2 games, Rise of the Tomb Raider released in 2015 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider in 2018.
Also in 2018 was the release of the third Tomb Raider blockbuster film. This film also saw a Hollywood Tomb Raider reboot and followed the story of the 2013 Tomb Raider game. Replacing Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft was Alicia Vikander. Similar to Camilla Luddington, Vikander represents Lara with a different accent from the upper class British RP that she originally was characterised with. Again, whether or not this was intentional is not a well documented discussion point.
So here we are in 2024, having not seen an iteration of Lara Croft for 6 years - the longest we have ever gone without seeing her in a new adventure. Thankfully, the wait is over with today’s launch of Netflix animation Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft.
She has represented so much over the years - a revolutionary protagonist, a sex symbol, a marvel of British design, the most iconic video game character ever. Both Lara Croft and the franchise of Tomb Raider have been a documentation of progress, from the technical to the cultural to the social. The voice actresses who have given Lara her voice have helped make her the cultural phenomenon that she is. Each a legend in their own right having voiced the legend herself.
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