Sophie Turner didn’t just put on Lara Croft’s boots – she let herself get dragged across a windy English beach in a parachute rig to sell the reboot.
New set footage from the upcoming Tomb Raider series shows Turner physically throwing herself into Lara Croft, literally getting hoisted and yanked by cables for a parachute landing shot. For a franchise built on impossible jumps and cartoon physics, this is our first real hint that Turner’s Lara might be less glossy pin-up and more bruised-and-breathless survivor.
The Moment
In a widely shared video from the set, shot near Surrey in southern England, Turner is rigged up in full Lara gear with a parachute stretched out behind her. Crew members hook her into a harness system, and on “action,” she’s pulled forward as the chute fills with wind, selling the illusion that she’s just dropped from the sky onto the shore.
The team runs the stunt several times: Turner gets yanked, the parachute snaps to life, she stumbles into a landing that looks a lot more “I nearly died” than “I just stepped off a private jet.” Between takes, she swaps out the bulky parachute pack for a smaller, more video game-accurate backpack, then heads into the woods to film more classic Lara trekking shots.
Turner is leading a stacked cast that includes genre legend Sigourney Weaver, plus Jason Isaacs and Bill Paterson – the kind of lineup that quietly tells you this isn’t some throwaway streaming experiment. This is a serious attempt to replant Lara Croft into 2020s pop culture.
The Take
Let’s be honest: one controlled parachute rig on a beach is not Tom Cruise hanging off a plane at 10,000 feet. But it is a deliberate message. When a lead actor lets themselves be tossed around like a crash-test dummy for a sequence that could’ve been 90% CGI, it’s not just about realism – it’s branding.
Turner has spent the last decade known to most of us as Sansa Stark: stoic, political, traumatized, not exactly sprinting through jungles with twin pistols. Add a high-profile divorce and tabloid custody coverage, and you’ve got a star who probably wouldn’t mind shifting the public conversation back to “serious actress, physical commitment” instead of “celebrity personal drama.”
This stunt work is step one. It says: my Lara Croft is not pure fantasy; she gets dirty, takes the hit, resets, does it again. It lines Turner up more with the Alicia Vikander survivalist era than Angelina Jolie’s slick early-2000s bombshell version – though the ponytail and silhouette are clearly tipping the hat to both.
This isn’t about proving she’s fearless; it’s about proving this Lara actually feels pain and keeps going anyway.
For a 40-plus audience who met Lara either as a blocky ’90s video game sprite or as Jolie in those leather shorts, the reboot question is always the same: why do this again? One solid answer is, “Because now we can tell a season-long story where she doesn’t magically heal between set pieces.” Seeing Turner do her own impact-heavy work – even in a controlled rig – suggests the show wants us to feel every bruise with her.
Receipts
Confirmed:
- Set video, published February 6, 2026, shows Sophie Turner strapped into a visible cable rig, performing a parachute-style landing on a beach location near Surrey, England, for the upcoming Tomb Raider series.
- Behind-the-scenes footage also captures Turner switching from a parachute pack to a smaller backpack and filming additional scenes walking through wooded terrain in full Lara Croft costume.
- Turner is leading the series as Lara Croft, with Sigourney Weaver, Jason Isaacs, and Bill Paterson among the announced co-stars, according to casting information released by the production and subsequent industry trade coverage.
- The show is being developed for a major streaming platform backed by Amazon’s studio arm, as confirmed in prior franchise announcements from the company.
Unverified:
- How extensive Turner’s stunt work will be across the full season – we’ve seen one practical parachute gag, not the full stunt schedule.
- Whether this iteration of Lara will lean more toward gritty realism like the recent video games or embrace some of the over-the-top flair of the early-2000s films. The tone is implied, not officially spelled out.
- Any definitive “ranking” of Angelina Jolie vs. Alicia Vikander vs. Sophie Turner as Lara – that debate is pure fan territory, not something the production has touched.
Backstory (For the Casual Reader)
If you’ve lost track of Lara Croft in between kids’ soccer schedules and peak-TV burnout, here’s the quick refresher. Tomb Raider began as a 1996 video game about a British archaeologist-adventurer raiding booby-trapped tombs in tiny shorts and big boots. The character exploded into a full-blown pop icon when Angelina Jolie took her on in two films in 2001 and 2003, all slow-motion acrobatics and early CGI swagger.
In 2018, Alicia Vikander rebooted Lara as a more grounded, bruised-and-battered twenty-something trying to survive rather than pose, echoing a darker reboot of the games themselves. Now it’s Turner’s turn – best known for growing up on-screen as Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones and for playing Jean Grey in the later X-Men films. A series format gives her more room to actually build Lara’s psychology, not just her biceps.
So when we see Turner willingly clip into a harness and get yanked across a cold British beach, it’s not just a cool day at work. It’s a promise that this Lara Croft might finally catch up with what long-time fans have wanted all along: a heroine who’s as emotionally complicated as she is physically capable – and who doesn’t mind eating a little sand in the process.
Where do you land on this: do you need your Lara Croft to do her own stunts to buy into a new version, or is it all about the storytelling for you?
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