Wonder Woman

Image credit: Angelina Jolie: Firooz Zahedi

PRIMAL SCREAM Jolie is game for new thrills in ''Tomb Raider''

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Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

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The following is an excerpt from Entertainment Weekly's June 15, 2001, cover story.

''There's a tarantula in here. Is that going to bother you?'' This is Angelina Jolie speaking -- a woman famous for sleeping with knives and keeping rats for house pets -- and clearly she isn't fazed in the least. She's standing inside a large canvas tent pitched in a steaming, vine choked patch of the Cambodian jungle, where, it turns out, tarantulas are always getting into everything. ''He was over there,'' Jolie nonchalantly informs her guest, nodding at a pile of camera equipment. ''He must have moved. I don't know where he is now. But I'm sure he'll turn up eventually.'' Can't wait.

What brings Jolie to this remote, arachnid infested region of Southeast Asia (during its November ''cool season,'' when temperatures dip all the way down to the high 90s) is, of course, ''Tomb Raider,'' Paramount Pictures' attempt to turn one of the most successful videogame series of all time into one of the biggest film franchises. For the past 10 days, the notoriously offbeat Oscar winner has been squeezing herself into a skintight black bodysuit, strapping on a pair of party size pistols, and tumbling around Cambodia's most sacred Buddhist shrine pretending to be Lara Croft, a globe trotting British adventurer on the trail of a mysterious archaeological artifact. Think James Bond crossed with Indiana Jones... in a Wonderbra.