Camilla Luddington On Playing Lara Croft And The Difficulties Of Pretending To Drown

Many will recognize Camilla Luddington from her recurring roles on shows like Grey's Anatomy , Californication , or True Blood , but gamers know her as Lara Croft.

Luddington provided Lara's voice and motion capture performance for the 2013 reboot, and lent a new level of grounded believability to a character that had previously fought dinosaurs and skateboarders in underground caverns. As part of our ongoing Rise of the Tomb Raider coverage, we had a chance to speak with Luddington about how her and how Lara's life has changed since their experience on Yamatai.

Game Informer: This time around, Lara is a more prepared, more confident adventurer. Are you playing a much
different Lara than who you played in the first game?

Camilla Luddington: I think so. One of the things I think is really interesting about her is she is wounded by her experiences in the
first game. She feels as if she has gone into a secret world and that
normal life is now impossible for her. Now she is consumed in a way
to chase artifacts and uncover mysteries even more so than
the first game. There is this drive behind her in this game to let the
world know that she is not lying. She didn’t make these things up, and
she doesn’t have to feel like she imagined something. That drive
behind her and the place she is coming from is a little bit different
and I think it makes her more than just a survivor like she was in the
first game. She realizes that being a tomb raider is who she is meant to
be.

Were you familiar Lara Croft and Tomb Raider prior to the 2013 reboot? Are you a fan?

She is such an iconic character that I assume everyone is familiar with the character. Also, for me when the first
game came out, I was probably like 12 or 13 or something like that and
my older brother actually had the game. I remember that he rarely let
me play, but I would sneak on sometimes. I was familiar with the
game really through him because he was a gamer. I grew
up with the games being played around my household and admittedly I’m
really bad at my own games, which is really depressing. I’m slowly
inching towards the end even now. I’ve seen it played the entire way
through. But yeah I kind of grew up around her, so I do think she iconic. I kind of assume everyone knows who she is.

If you went back in time and told that 12 year old version of
you that one day you would be Lara Croft, what do you think she would
say?

I think she would say, I need to play the game more because I was
never allowed to play it [laughs]. I think I would use that as an excuse to
grab the controls from my brother and say, "Actually I’m going to be Lara
Croft, so you need to have me play the game."

How much has your role changed between the 2013 Tomb Raider and Rise of the Tomb Raider?

It’s very similar. It was facial capture the last time around, except
there really weren’t dots on my face. I think there might have been at
one point – maybe for the trailer. Obviously they took facial capture,
they just probably did it in a different way. This time around we are
using something called Movawhich is really exciting because it just captures so much more of what
you are doing in a scene and makes it just so much more realistic.

I’ve kind of spoken about it before, but just to put it in terms for
people to understand, facial capture is usually 90 points of reference
on a face and what Mova is a fluorescent paint that gets airbrushed on
your face and you can see it under a fluorescent light. It actually
captures 7,000 points of reference. For me, like I said, it’s just
constantly so exciting to see that because when I get to see a little a
bit of what we captured it just looks incredible. It blows my mind; you
can really feel the mass effect. More of your performance is in the game
than ever. Not everything is motion captured, but Mova is just
something that makes it just a little extra exciting.

Lara is a very physical character. Do you have to train to be Lara Croft?

I don’t technically have to train, but I have someone on set who will
show me, kind of like I did in the first game, the way to hold certain
weapons so that I’m not holding them wrong. I realized very quickly from
the last game that it was a lot more physical than I thought it was
going to be and so for myself, I did things like circuit training or
even biking or running. Those are things that just help me maintain the
endurance through an eight hour shoot of motion capture. Where things
get really technical or kind of aggressive, they will have stunt people
in and kind of go over that because it needs to be choreographed in a
way that they feel like stunts are properly performed and better. It is
taxing and exhausting, but it’s fun and I want to do as much of it as I
personally can.

For stories on getting recognized as Lara in public and how Luddington can't dress up as Lara for Halloween, head to page two.