PICS: Lara Croft set to raid Cape Town

Published Jan 21, 2017

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Cape Town – After almost a year of intense preparation, the much anticipated Tomb Raider movie reboot starts its first day of shooting in and around Cape Town next week.

And Weekend Argus can exclusively reveal the first glimpses of the sets where all the skop, skiet en donder, will play out.

Billed to be one of the biggest releases of 2018, the feature stars Oscar-winning Swede Alicia Vikander, who steps into the shoes of Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft.

Last year Vikander won best supporting actress Oscar for The Danish Girl and co-starred in Jason Bourne.

She has been spotted around Cape Town in recent weeks with her partner since 2014, actor Michael Fassbender, with whom costarred in The Light Between Oceans.

The bad guy leads are played by The Hateful Eight and Sons of Anarchy actor Walton Goggins (as Mathias Vogel) and Into the Badlands star Daniel Wu (as Lu Ren).

Under the helm of hot Norwegian director Roar Uthaug, the first week films at a quarry on a Paarl wine estate where a substantial number of the scenes set out for the next three months will be shot.

The rest of this new Lara Croft saga will be shot mainly in aircraft hangar-type studios in and around the city where sets have been especially built. They include stages in Epping and at Cape Town Film Studios (CTFS) off Baden Powell Drive.

In addition to indoor stages, some of the action-packed shooting will take place in a specially-constructed outdoor water tank on the CTFS lot.

Featuring a flotilla of patchwork boats and small ships, it has been built to mimic a section of a Hong Kong fishing harbour.

In one of the main scenes to be shot here, Croft chases a gang of knife-wielding teenagers who later turn on her. In one daring stunt she will leap from a boat into a helicopter.

Shooting in South Africa wraps at the end of April and then shifts to the UK in May.

The film was originally going to be shot in Australia, but producers moved to South Africa after a dispute with Australian authorities over tax offset incentives for location shooting.

Weekend Argus

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