14 DAY TRIAL // A little over a year ago, word got out in the media that producers were looking at Megan Fox for the part of Lara Croft in the upcoming “Tomb Raider” movie, since Angelina Jolie was no longer interested in the project and didn’t fit the bill either. The rumor was rubbished later, but it never really died down. Still, fans clinging to a shimmer of hope will be disappointed to hear Fox herself turned down the offer, ShowbizSpy says.
It’s not that the actress is not happy about the kind of opportunity she’s being offered, the report says, citing sources well familiar with her take on the matter. On the contrary, she realizes starring as Lara Croft would come to expand her fanbase even more, and literally make her popularity soar. However, she’s keen on ridding herself of Angelina Jolie comparisons and, to point out the obvious, starring in a movie whose lead Jolie was until now would certainly not help her case.
“Megan Fox has turned down the chance to be the next Lara Croft. The Transformers star ‘reluctantly’ said no to the part in the next Tomb Raider movie because she hates being compared to the film franchise’s original star, Angelina Jolie. ‘The offer has been on the table for Megan for a while but she’s reluctantly turned it down,’ says a movie insider. ‘She’s the logical choice to play Lara and she loves the character but the comparison with Angelina is too much. It looks like the movie will now star an unknown’,” the aforementioned e-zine writes.
Indeed, in past interviews, Fox did her best to point out that she’d like to be seen as herself and not as “the next Angelina Jolie.” “The media has to package you and sell you somehow and sell their magazines so everybody has to be ‘the new’ or ‘the next’ someone or something. If I am not a party girl and they can’t sell me as that, and I’m not an Oscar winning actress and they can’t sell me as that, then they have to package me somehow and for some reason they latched on to the Angelina thing because I have a lot of tattoos,” Fox said in an interview last year, as cited by the same publication.
Of course, if the rumor that she turned down the Lara Croft part is true, Fox’s decision to work her way towards being considered a respectable actress could also have had something to do with it, it is also being said. Doing Lara Croft would only come to damage her reputation as a serious actress – one that she’s still working hard to get off the ground – and, by refusing to do it, she could be moving away from her image as an action movie star, which the “Transformers” franchise has made possible.