‘Horses taught me about listening, about humility, about overcoming fear’

Rhona Mitra found fame as the original Lara Croft, before ill health and Hollywood toxicity led her to carve out a new life. She speaks to Adam White about survival and her new film

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In some ways, if only on the surface, Rhona Mitra led a charmed Hollywood existence. From the late 1990s and into the 2010s, the British actor starred in lots of hit US TV - series such as Boston Legal, The Last Ship and Nip/Tuck - alongside movies like Ali G Indahouse, Sweet Home Alabama and an Underworld sequel. She was typecast, often as English, haughty and dangerous, but she was busy. She made money. She had a house. There are numerous reasons she left it all behind, she tells me. But if she were to sum up why she brought her time in America to a close, it would go a little something like this.

“Los Angeles is a machine that runs on sales,” the 49-year-old explains, with a sonorous, sharply enunciated calm, from her new home in Uruguay. “It’s the stock market. It doesn’t care about conserving souls. It will use, abuse, rape and pillage until it’s done with you, and a lot of people lose themselves to it. It’s multilayered as to how and why I had to leave. But fundamentally, it was to save my soul.”

Today, her world is vastly different. I speak to her over Zoom, Mitra with a mug of tea in hand, the 400 acres of land she presides over in the rugged Uruguayan sierras just out of shot. There she rehabilitates and rewilds horses, many of whom come to her sick, malnourished and traumatised by abuse. It is tough but incredibly rewarding work, funded via donations and occasional acting jobs, which are now typically filmed outside of the US - like the comic-book fantasy movie Red Sonja, which is released this week. “I’ve sort of excommunicated myself,” Mitra says, with a smile. “I feel like I stepped through the closet into Narnia and I've been on the other side for nearly a decade now.” Red Sonja is like a tentacle connecting her to another place, she jokes. Or actually, she corrects herself, another life.