Phoebe Waller

Phoebe Waller-Bridge hopes to develop something "dangerous and exciting" when she resurrects Tomb Raider as a TV series for Amazon.

News of the Tomb Raider TV series dropped in January, with Waller-Bridge attached to pen the scripts and executive produce. Before the WGA strike, Waller-Bridge spoke to Vanity Fair about her commitment to making the show for the franchise's general audiences and diehard fans.

"There's room to do something really quite dangerous," she asserted. "And if I can do something dangerous and exciting with Tomb Raider, I already have an audience of people who love Lara and hopefully will continue to. And that is a very unusual position to be in. It's the old Trojan horse."

Waller-Bridge is no stranger to the action-adventure genre thanks to scripting James Bond film No Time to Die and more recently starring in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but she revealed her appreciation for the Tomb Raider franchise dates back even further.

"My parents were very smart because they didn't actually limit me," she recalled of playing Tomb Raider. "They could sense that I was going to just game myself into the ground, and I did. I packed the PlayStation away, and I was like, 'I've got to not do that because I've got to write and read and do other stuff.' "

As noted in the cover story, Waller-Bridge immersed herself in the world of Tomb Raider again during the COVID-19 pandemic when she took the games for another spin. She found her love for Lara Croft unwavering and acted on her "big roaring instincts" when Amazon approached her.

"God, it literally felt like that teenager in me saying: do right by her, do right by Lara!" she said. "The opportunity to have, as we were talking earlier, a female action character…. Having worked on Bond and having worked as an actor on Indy, I feel like I've been building up to this.

"What if I could take the reins on an action franchise, with everything I've learned, with a character I adore, and also just bring back some of that '90s vibe?" she continued, adding that "it's such a wonderful feeling to think you know what to do" with such a project.

Tomb Raider is still in early development so no star, director, or premiere date has been announced yet, but if you're feeling inspired to head out on a quest with the famous video game adventurer, you might want to read up on how to play the Tomb Raider games in chronological order.

Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.