0 comments
Gamers online are taking issue with the casting of Sophie Turner for Amazon Prime’s new screen adaption of Lara Croft. Complaints unsurprisingly range from her not ‘looking’ the part to issues with her previous acting.
In news that probably won’t surprise many, reactions to Lara Croft’s latest look for Amazon’s Primes adaption have been mixed.
Gamers and fans are unhappy with the casting of Sophie Turner, with comments saying that she doesn’t ‘look’ the part and that she ‘can’t act’ based on her previous work on Game of Thrones as Sansa Stark. It seems a bit misogynistic if you ask us, but whatever.
View this post on Instagram
Amazon has confirmed that production for the show is currently underway. Aside from this first character reveal, we’ve very little information to run with, though it looks likely that the show will be releasing at the end of 2026 or some time in 2027.
Sophie Turner will star as Lara, with an ensemble cast including Martin Bobb-Semple, Sigourney Weaver, Jason Isaacs and Jack Bannon, among others.
It’s worth noting that, despite online criticism regarding her previous work, Turner was nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series at the Emmy Awards in 2019. This was for her depiction of Stark in Game of Thrones as previously mentioned.
Still, that hasn’t stopped the fanbase from piling on the hot takes. GameStop – yes, the official US videogame retailer – retweeted IGN’s announcement of Turner’s outfit with a comment saying: ‘this is not Lara Croft.’ It received over 30k retweets, though users offered some great clap backs in response.
This is not Lara Croft https://t.co/pEs909qo0k
— GameStop (@gamestop) January 15, 2026
Venturing onto various Reddit communities, it seems that fans are largely displeased, with some being particularly defensive over accusations that they may be overly fixated on Lara Croft’s sex appeal rather than the quality of her character development.
Comment
byu/KImk9ff from discussion
inTombRaider
Most of the issues stem from fans feeling that Turner doesn’t have Lara’s figure.
Keep in mind that the character originally debuted on the PlayStation in the mid 1990s, and was made up of a handful of polygons. The purist approach is quite transparent, frankly, and follows a similar pattern of other female protagonists in games receiving an excessive amount of criticism compared to male-centric franchises.
Remember the stir around Aloy, the main character in Sony’s Horizon Forbidden West game? There were some truly embarrassing tweets regarding her looks, indicating that some players had barely ever spoken to real women. Some of the issues with Turner are from similar circles.
‘She honestly just looks like some random comic con girl in cosplay,’ wrote one user on Reddit. ‘She just doesn’t look like Lara to me,’ said another. ‘Like yeah she got in great shape for it but like face wise she just doesn’t fit. Lara has a lethal face card, Sophie just doesn’t.’
The comments unfairly nitpicking Sophie’s looks aren’t exactly shocking, unfortunately. We saw similar, heated comments regarding Bella Ramsey as Ellie in the HBO Last of Us series. Viewers said that she ‘ruined’ the show and that she should have been replaced with a different actress.
We’re not saying that these shows shouldn’t be shielded from genuine issues regarding style, writing, pacing, and faithfulness to their source material.
There are plenty of subpar video game adaptations both in film and television, and some casting choices have been peculiar or, at worst, cynical attempts at drawing in wider audiences. If a production is clearly trying to piggy back off a notable IP then it should be called out. Paramount’s Halo series did just this, for example.
