It’s been thirty years since Lara Croft was unleashed on the world via the hit video game “Tomb Raider.” Released first in Europe, on Oct. 24, 1996, for the Sega Saturn, the title broke the rules in every way: an action-packed video game for adults with a female lead player character. With her double handguns, long plait and kickass attitude, Croft became an instant hit and “Tomb Raider” has continued to inspire new games and screen adaptations over the past three decades (the latest, Prime Video’s adaptation starring Sophie Turner, is already building plenty of anticipation). While superstars including Angelina Jolie and Hayley Atwell have all inhabited the character, the woman who first breathed life into Lara Croft was Shelley Blond, then just a fledgling voice actor whose role on for “Tomb Raider” was only her second ever professional gig.
Ahead of the game’s thirtieth anniversary, Blond sat down with Variety to reminisce about that first audition, the role Lara continues to play in her life and the impact of AI on the voice acting community. I had recently signed with a voiceover agent and done one job, and she called me and said they were looking for the voice of Lara Croft, but that I probably wouldn’t get it because they’d been looking for six to nine months. She thought it would be a great experience for me to audition, just for the audition experience.
They faxed me over a rough picture [of Croft] and some script lines, and I pressed play and record on my cassette recorder, because it was 1995, sent it back in the post, and then a few days later heard that they wanted to do a conference call, which I did. Again, I repeated some lines over the conference call, and then they told me at the end of the call that I got the job. I think it was just hearing the voice and knowing that was her.
They said to me when I did the recording they wanted it to be very… kind of a female James Bond delivery. Sean Connery but without the accent. They wanted an Indiana Jones but female.
They must have heard something in my voice that went with the idea of her that they had in their head. It was rough, as in, it wasn’t colored in, but it was pretty much the shorts, the gun, the holster, the plait, and I thought she was very sexy and very ballsy, and I liked the look very much. I really just did my own voice, and it just resonated with them.
So, lucky for me, I got the gig. I’m not a gamer, so even at that time, I wasn’t aware of any video games beyond “Pac-Man.” Core Design and Eidos were the two companies that that made the [original “Tomb Raider”] game and the character, and they both said to me, “We don’t know how well this game is going to do because we’ve never done a game for adults before. But let’s see how we go.” They didn’t know themselves.
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