Walton Goggins to play the villain opposite Alicia Vikander in Tomb Raider

Last Updated on July 31, 2021

Every good Tomb Raider needs a villain and the upcoming big-screen reboot of the long-running video game franchise just snagged itself a fantastic one. Variety has reported that Walton Goggins (THE HATEFUL EIGHT) is currently in final negotiations to play the villain in Roar Uthaug's TOMB RAIDER opposite Alicia Vikander.

Walton Goggins is one of those actors whose mere presence elevates whichever project he chooses to be a part of, so this has definitely knocked my excitement for TOMB RAIDER up several notches. After first noticing Goggins and his absurdly pearly-white chompers in The Shield, I made it a point to follow the actor to his next project, which, thankfully, wound up being Justified, the truly excellent "neo-western" which starred Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens and Walton Goggins as Boyd Crowder. We don't know all that much about TOMB RAIDER just yet, but producer Graham King has said that the film will find Lara Croft searching to see if her father is dead or alive, with Alicia Vikander recently adding that the film will tell a story about “a young and untested Croft fighting to survive her first adventure.”

They told me they were doing the film based on the reboot of the game from 2013. That is more of an origin story. You get into an emotional aspect of getting to know Lara hopefully in an in-depth way. So I hope that doing a film of the rebooted game will bring something new and fresh that’ll stand on its own two legs.

TOMB RAIDER is set for a March 16, 2018 release.