Tomb Raider's Alicia Vikander thinks the lack of female characters in the film is 'questionable' (exclusive)

Alicia Vikander is one of the few women to lead her own action movie but that still doesn’t mean she’s impressed with how it turned out.

In fact, the actress said it was “questionable” that her latest movie, Tomb Raider, didn’t have more female characters involved in the main bulk of the action.

Speaking to Yahoo Movies, Vikander – who plays Lara Croft in the reboot – says a sequel will certainly need more women playing a bigger role in the narrative.

“It has set up for that a bit, which I’m very excited about, of course, that is if the audience want to see a further adventure but, yeah, I agree,” the Swedish star said.

“It’s this whole company in the film that we meet up on this island and I’m like ‘why didn’t they hire any women to go on this expedition?’ that, I think, was a bit questionable, so I do hope if there is a further adventure it’s going to have a lot more female characters involved.”

In the 2013 game the film is based on there are two female characters who accompany Croft on her expedition to Yamatai – Samantha Nishimuri and Joslyn Reyes – but they were erased from the film’s narrative.

Director Roar Uthaug defended their removal by saying that he wanted the film to focus on the father-daughter relationship between Lara and her father, played by Dominic West.

“This is an origin story of Lara Croft for the big screen and we really wanted to focus on Lara and also the father-daughter relationship which I feel is the emotional core of this movie,” the Norwegian filmmaker told Yahoo Movies.

“We didn’t want other relationships to take away from that.”

Despite the reduced role of women in the movie compared to the game, Vikander has championed the more progressive interpretation of her character.

“I think that’s really about the times that we’re in and that society has changed,” she said of her Lara being less of a pin-up than Angelina Jolie’s iteration.

“To be honest with me, with Angelina Jolie’s films that meant a lot to me,” she continued. “I hadn’t really seen a lot of female action star leading a film like that up on the screen, sadly that was how rare it was for us growing up.

“Nowadays, you don’t want one-dimensional female characters, you really want depth and you want to get to know them; you want to be on their journey.

“I also think that [if] you ask, both young women and men, what they find maybe, aspiring, cool, attractive, even sexy, you would get a very different answer nowadays, which is just cool because it shows we’ve really progressed.” Vikander said,

Tomb Raider is out in cinemas this Friday

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