"I didn't accept me in the role at first," Jolie recalls. "But the studio polled people and fans were happy to see me in the role, they accepted that, so it made me happy. Really there isn't that much that's different from us, I suppose. Certainly I love adventure; I love other countries and other cultures. I love to fight for something I care about. Plus I think she's a very good friend with the guy she lives with and I think I am to people close to me."
As much as Jolie has in common with the role many consider to be the part she was born to play, similar to most video-game-turned-movies, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider opened up at the box office to some overwhelmingly bad reviews. Nevertheless, audiences ran to theaters to see Jolie play Lara Croft, and the film raked in over $131 million in the U.S. alone. Gross aside, Jolie knew that something bigger and better could be done with the budding franchise, and her answers to some of the problems critics and Tomb Raider fans alike discussed after the 2001 summer hit are addressed in this summer's sequel, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.
In The Cradle of Life, Lara Croft is on a quest to save Pandora's Box, a journey that took Jolie to a variety of places including Greece, England, Hong Kong and Kenya. Besides more exotic filming locations, Jolie promises that The Cradle of Life will have a more realistic feel to it and take place in less of a video game fantasy world. She also says that Lara will take on a transition of her own, becoming less of a cartoon character and far more athletic, darker and sexier in the process.
"I think she's changed," Jolie states. "I haven't seen the film- I don't know what they've cut- but I think she's changed in that we're just able to see more of her. I think that was missing in the last one. A lot of people felt that they wanted to be more inside her world as opposed to curious about her. We took that seriously and we said that there are things that maybe she loved, things that she fears or things that make her laugh. We've just made her more human or more accessible- you're just more inside this time. I think there's probably still room even more to grow about what you can do with her. Even I still don't know completely who she is."
