Angelina Jolie added another action series to her filmography with her Tomb Raider films. But she admitted doing the role justice could sometimes be a painful adjustment.
Angelina Jolie felt she was warned to stay away from ‘Tomb Raider’ because of her Oscar win
Jolie was reaching new heights in her career by the time she starred in the 2001 film adaptation of the Tomb Raider games. Her celebrity profile was expanding thanks to starring in several notable projects. She gained even more attention for her role in Girl, Interrupted, which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for.
Her star-power had the possibility of getting even bigger after being cast as Lara Croft in Tomb Raider. But it was an opportunity she was originally hesitant to accept.
“I said, ‘I really didn’t feel like that character suited me.’ I actually didn’t at first want to do it; I said no,” she once told Collider.
There were even others in the actor’s inner-circle who thought that Tomb Raider might have been beneath her. Especially after winning her Oscar. But Jolie rejected that notion and decided to do the film, anyway.
“There’s this idea that if you’re an Oscar winner, you should take yourself seriously. And that’s stupid. You should do what you feel like doing. Nobody should ever take themselves seriously. Period,” Jolie once told E! Online (via IGN).
Angelina Jolie cried every night in a bath tub doing ‘Tomb Raider’
Tomb Raider helped Jolie get in touch with her more adventurous side. As expected, the action film required Jolie to be physically fit enough to execute some of the stunts. But the adrenaline eventually kicked in for Jolie. Soon, her love for stunts even worried the movie’s director Simon West.
“Angelina was doing triple back flips on the set. She was doing the bunji jumps from 50 feet up in the air. She was laughing. The stunt doubles were clinging to their safety ropes,” West once said according to Cinema. “For one scene where Lara surfs through the air on a thin log, her stunt double refused to do it. Angie said ‘no problem’. Within a week, she was going, ‘I love it! Let’s go again!’”
But when the adrenaline wore off, Jolie began to wonder if she was doing a bit too much as an actor. And this led to the Oscar-winner doubting her performance as a whole.
“One night, I was sitting in my bathtub with all my bruises and cuts. I was crying and thinking, ‘What am I doing? I can’t pull this off? I can’t even keep the guns straight. I keep hitting myself with her stupid braid,’” Jolie remembered. “But after a few months of pushing yourself, you’re suddenly swinging on a bunji rope and realizing, ‘Wow, I’m not hitting the wall.’”
Angelina Jolie learned that acting wasn’t very fulfilling after doing ‘Tomb Raider’
Jolie felt she experienced an immense growth after doing the first Tomb Raider film. One of the benefits of her growth was discovering that her passions went beyond acting.
“I’ve learned that I’m happy when I feel like I have some use as a human being. And that just being an actress was not fulfilling to me,” she once said in an IGN interview. “I feel grateful that I’ve been exposed to the world around me, and I travel a lot, and I meet amazing people. I’ve learned a lot, and I feel like I have a lot to learn. Feeling a sense of purpose, and being connected to what really life is about, what really we are all on this planet for – which is not to be doing films and entertainment.”
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