Angelina Jolie did things that brought her to tears in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. But perhaps the most challenging aspect of playing Croft was the action hero’s wardrobe. Particularly, Jolie wasn’t a fan of the shorts her character wore and hoped she wouldn’t wear them before shooting the movie.

Angelina Jolie told ‘Tomb Raider’ director that she wouldn’t wear Lara Croft’s shorts for the movie

Jolie found a lot to like about Lara Croft, especially when compared to other characters she played. To the Oscar-winner, Croft was the right mixture of strength and femininity.

“Almost every other suggestion for a movie I’ve done has been for a short, brown haircut and leather pants because THAT’S what a tough girl is,” Jolie once told Female. “A tough girl couldn’t possibly be a curvaceous woman who also is comfortable with her sexuality. And so many women are like, ‘Well, we don’t like the woman who’s comfortable with her body and flirtatious because that means she doesn’t like other women or that means she’s too flirty. We’re not comfortable with her.’”

Jolie further shared in the interview that she and the film’s crew knew that Tomb Raider fans would wonder how accurate her costume would be. In the video games, Croft was known for her t-shirt and short pants combo. Although Jolie admitted doing Tomb Raider was very freeing for her, wearing the character’s trademark shorts would’ve been anything but. She disliked the outfit so much that she initially told the film’s director, Simon West, she wouldn’t wear the iconic attire.

“We knew we had to have the shorts at one point, which was very, very difficult,” she said in an interview with Screen Slam. “And it was big discussions to the last minute about me….I think it was the first thing I said to Simon, probably. Was that I would do the movie, but would not get in the shorts. It did take a while, and then we thought, for the people that know her, you have to get in the shorts.”

Being in the shorts took some adjusting to for Jolie. But she acknowledged that the costume brought her closer to her character.

“It was very, very uncomfortable. You feel like her,” she said.

Angelina Jolie changed her signature Lara Croft costume for ‘Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life’

Jolie would reprise Lara Croft for the 2003 sequel Cradle of Life. But her main outfit in the second film would be much different than what it was in her first. Jolie swapped the t-shirt and shorts for a sort of silver skintight bodysuit that she’d be seen wearing in the trailers and promotional posters for the film. This was a conscious decision on Jolie’s part, who wouldn’t compromise in the sequel like she did in its predecessor.

“During the first film we had to really consider the game a lot and not stray too far from it, to try to make the game character a real person,” she once said in an interview with IGN. “She had that video-vixen type thing and a lot of the clothes were stretchy and that kind of thing. But we didn’t get into the quality of the lady aspect of her. And her body wasn’t the way I wanted it to be. So, for the second one, I wanted it to be more my body. And I wanted her to be classier and more interesting as a woman. So we did have a conscious effort with the clothes, and with many things about her.”

Jolie confided that the costume change was one of many modifications that was made to Croft’s story to make the sequel better.

“Yeah, it was kind of… I had no intention of doing another one, because the only reason I wanted to do another one – besides the great adventure of doing them because they’re fun – was that I felt that there was a lot I hadn’t done the way I wanted to do it,” Jolie said. “So, the agreement was that if we were going to do it, we were going to do it right this time. And that was how we all felt coming in. We had lots at of meetings. We said, This was all the things that we were unhappy about, and there are the things we’re going to change.”