How Steve Irwin inspired one of Angelina Jolie’s most iconic characters: “I had my doubts about it”
It’s generally a rite of passage in Hollywood for any telegenic young star to follow up their professional breakthrough with a role in a blockbuster movie or two. Angelina Jolie is just one of the countless up-and-comers to have trodden that very same path.
Although she made her screen debut in 1982 and began picking up the performative pace a decade later, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that Jolie secured stardom, when she found quickfire success and awards season glory on screens both big and small.
She won a Golden Globe for ‘Best Supporting Actress – Series, Miniseries or Television Film’ for playing the subject’s second wife Cornelia in 1997’s made-for-TV movie George Wallace. She followed it up with another Golden Globe win for ‘Best Actress – Miniseries or Television Film’ in Gia, and the year after that scooped an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ in Girl, Interrupted.
Jolie was only 24 when she took to the stage to collect her Oscar, which was her third consecutive major trophy. Naturally, big-budget studio movies quickly came calling, with the star happy to oblige by taking second billing behind Nicolas Cage in the high-speed thriller Gone in 60 Seconds and playing the title character in the video game adaptation Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.
As tends to be the case with the console-to-screen genre, the end result was hardly a work of cinematic excellence, but it sure was a lucrative one. In fact, after hoovering up almost $275million at the box office, it reigned as the highest-grossing video game movie ever made for almost a decade until it was surpassed by Jake Gyllenhaal’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in 2010.
The role of an intrepid adventurer who also doubles as a sex symbol didn’t quite require Jolie to plumb the emotional depths that had brought her such early success in the first place. However, as she explained to the BBC, there was another unexpected influence on her Croft beyond “every kind of sexy Italian female actor I’ve ever watched”.
“And she’s also like that crocodile hunter guy in Australia,” she offered, comparing the Tomb Raider figurehead to the beacon of wholesome positivity, Steve Irwin. “At one point, I had my doubts about it. I’m wondering if this is the sort of thing a serious actor would do, and then I got into it completely.”
It goes without saying that serious actors make silly movies all the time, and even when the franchise was rebooted following the Jolie-led sequel The Cradle of Life, the Tomb Raider saga stuck to what it had already known by hiring another Oscar-winning rising star to lead the line in Alicia Vikander. However, it remains unclear if her successor also used Irwin as a touchstone.
