Rhona Mitra

From Lara Croft's Pixels to Neil Marshall's Desert

Rhona Mitra didn't start her career in front of a movie camera but under the lights of an advertising campaign that was looking for flesh and blood for a pixelated polygon. In 1997, she became the first official Lara Croft model to promote the video game Tomb Raider II. That experience brought her worldwide visibility but also pinned on her a action-woman label that would take decades to soften.

It was a brief phase.

A few months later she was fired over creative differences with the producer, and she took the opportunity to move to the United States. She arrived in Los Angeles determined, knowing that her looks could be a trap if she didn't handle them carefully. But the American market gives nothing away, and her first years were spent landing brief appearances in series that almost nobody remembers today.

The assault on prestige television

Her real break into the industry came when she stopped trying to be a comic book heroine. In 1999, she landed a recurring role on Party of Five, which showed that her British accent and stern gaze worked in conventional drama. So her move to the big leagues of cable television was a logical result of her discipline on set.

In 2003, David E. Kelley cast her as attorney Tara Wilson in The Practice. The character made such an impact that she moved to the spin-off Boston Legal the following year, alongside James Spader. Working on a production of that caliber gave her the serious actress credibility she needed to get casting directors in film to start taking notes.

That's when she began to feel the weight of the industry.

Because Hollywood has a habit of typecasting women who can handle a weapon with elegance, in 2008 she took on the challenge of starring in Doomsday under director Neil Marshall. For this shoot, she underwent extreme military training and nearly lost the vision in one eye due to an infection caused by the cosmetic contact lenses her character wore.

Scars, Latex and Retreat to the Countryside

The movie was a box office flop.

But that stumble didn't stop her rise in genre cinema. In 2009, she replaced Kate Beckinsale in the prequel Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, taking on the role of Sonja. It was a production with a budget of 35 million dollars that managed to gross nearly three times that worldwide. Despite the numbers, Mitra decided she didn't want to spend the rest of her life squeezed into a black latex suit.

Over the years, her interests shifted toward projects that allowed her to shoot in wild outdoor locations. Between 2014 and 2015, she joined the cast of The Last Ship, playing Dr. Rachel Scott. On this Michael Bay series, the crew shot on real U.S. Navy destroyers, which lent a technical authenticity she has always preferred over green screen.

In 2018, she appeared in the fourth season of Supergirl, playing the villain Mercy Graves. It was one of her last jobs before deciding that life in the Hollywood hills no longer interested her as much as raising horses.

By 2024, she joined the shoot of Hounds of War, sharing the screen with Frank Grillo in a production filmed entirely in Malta. In 2023, she took part in The Last Girl, a low-budget film where the crew numbered no more than thirty people. The total budget for that production was less than two million dollars.