Four months ago Sophie Turner was announced as the latest actress to play video game heroine Lara Croft in a new Tomb Raider series developed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

Yesterday, Prime Video, which is producing the new adaptation as a series, dropped a first-look photo of Turner done up as Lara, and this is easily the most game-accurate interpretation of the character yet.

And it’s not just costuming and hair and makeup. Turner has been sporting abs of steel on social media for months, she’s obviously been training like crazy for this role and the action Lara Croft demands.

Tomb Raider has had a troubled history, entirely back before the video game curse was broken and suddenly everyone knew how to adapt games for film and TV. Angelina Jolie starred in a couple of movies in the early 2000s, they aren’t the most awful movies ever made but they’re also not good. In 2018 Alicia Vikander headlined another attempt to adapt Tomb Raider for the movies, and while that movie is more coherent than the Angelina set, it’s also not particularly good either. Now, though, they’re shifting to TV, which might be a much better fit for the lore-heavy Tomb Raider.

Prime Video has had a lot of success with Fallout, which is a series based on another lore-heavy game. The video game movies that have worked best as films are, so far, movies aimed at kids based on games kids play (Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Bros.). The games grown-ups play tend to be big on lore and worldbuilding, which is why the best video game adaptations have been on TV, chiefly The Last of Us and Fallout. (The less said about HALO, the better.) Can Tomb Raider follow their example and finally turn Lara Croft into a live-action heroine?

I’m certainly willing to find out, but Tomb Raider is built on Indiana Jones lines, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge has some personal experience with how little nostalgia exists for Indy in the wider culture. So I hope she has something else up her sleeve for a Tomb Raider series than just making it a long Indiana Jones-style story, because I’m not sure anyone really wants to see that. But they’re off to a solid start with Sophie Turner who, if nothing else, is already everyone’s favorite live-action Lara.

Sophie Turner as Lara Croft (Prime Video)
Photo credits: Prime Video

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