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Netflix

When it comes to Cleopatra, the enigmatic ruler whose political savvy — and romantic entanglements — have made her an endless source of fascination, Hollywood has never gotten it right.

Elizabeth Taylor’s 1963 portrayal — for which she donned a braided wig and winged eyeliner — is as iconic as it was flawed. Angelina Jolie’s potential casting in a <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/14/18182744/cleopatra-white-actress-liz-taylor-angelina-jolie-lady-gaga" target=_blank>long rumored but yet to be filmed biopic</a> was met with backlash in 2019, as were subsequent rumors that Israeli actress Gal Gadot would take on the role. The consensus? Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile (as in Egypt, as in Africa), didn’t look like any of them.

But when Netflix introduced Adele James, who is Black and biracial, as the ancient Egyptian monarch in a trailer for the docudrama “Queen Cleopatra,” the criticism was particularly ardent. More like: Cleopatra definitely didn’t look like that.

Cleopatra “had light skin and Hellenistic (Greek) features,” per <a href="https://www.facebook.com/tourismandantiq/posts/pfbid0ByWrGbPzU8PdRyL6og5LsKUYesxMqBAdPwNVRtLdca9UxHkzd5DipxnQmTtxE8Dzl" target=_blank>a statement</a> from Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. Zahi Hawass, a prominent (and <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-zahi-hawass-72874123/" target=_blank>controversial</a>) Egyptologist who twice served as the head of that agency, wrote in a <a href="https://www.arabnews.com/node/2290456" target=_blank>column for Arab News</a> that Cleopatra “was many things, and well deserving of having her story told to modern audiences, but one thing she most definitely was not was black.”

“Queen Cleopatra,” the second installment of the Jada Pinkett Smith-produced “African Queens” anthology, arrived Wednesday on Netflix and — despite the ongoing controversy over the docudrama’s depiction of Egypt’s last pharaoh — is not about whether Cleopatra was Black. The four-episode series follows her reign from 51 to 30 B.C. and features dramatized reenactments of her ascension to the throne following the death of her father, Ptolemy XII, her relationships with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, the downfall of the ancient Egypt’s last dynasty and a handful of other milestones.

The scenes are interspersed with commentary from experts such as Shelley Haley, a retired professor of classics and Africana studies and consultant on the series, and Debora Heard, a PhD candidate in Nubian archaeology. The series details undisputed facts about Cleopatra, including the Macedonian-Greek descent of her father’s line and that Greek was her first language, but it also makes clear there are things we don’t definitively know about her, including the identity of her mother and whether her dalliances with Caesar — the father of her firstborn son — were romantic, strategic or both.

In the first few minutes of the series, Haley recalls her grandmother telling her “I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was Black.'” Critics glommed on to the snippet after it appeared in the trailer. But, ultimately, Haley says in the series, “We don’t know her exact racial heritage.”

“She learned the Egyptian language. She practiced the Egyptian religion,” Haley says in the docudrama. “She wants to be remembered as an Egyptian.”

“Ancient Egyptians would have had a variety of different complexions, as we find in other African cultures today,” adds Cleopatra scholar Sally-Ann Ashton, also featured in the series. “Given that Cleopatra represents herself as an Egyptian, it seems very strange that we insist on depicting her as a wholly European.”

Heard calls Cleopatra a “chameleon” in that “she looks different depending on who it is that’s depicting her.” Islam Issa, whose <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1529377587/" target=_blank>forthcoming book examines the enduring influence of ancient Alexandria</a>, says “the appeal of Cleopatra is … that everyone can imagine her in their own way.” “I imagine her to have curly hair like me and a similar skin color,” he says in the docuseries.

The backlash to the series has been frustrating for scholars such as Haley, who said in a Zoom interview with The Washington Post that those criticizing the docuseries are “applying our racial constructs to the ancient world, and that is anachronistic.”

Issa, the only expert of Egyptian descent featured in the docudrama, echoed that sentiment in an <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/5/1/cleopatra-was-egyptian-whether-black-or-brown-matters" target=_blank>opinion piece for Al-Jazeera</a>. “With the exception of Jews, ethnicities weren’t really recorded in early Egyptian history,” he wrote. “In Alexandria especially, there was no normative race: genetic makeup was varied as people from across the region, from Europeans to Nubians, lived and married on its lands.”

Pinkett Smith told Netflix’s companion website, Tudum, that the goal of “African Queens” — which launched earlier this year with a look at the 17th century ruler Njinga — was to share underrepresented stories about “historical women who were so powerful and were the backbones of African nations.”

“We don’t often get to see or hear stories about Black queens, and that was really important for me, as well as for my daughter, and just for my community to be able to know those stories because there are tons of them,” Pinkett Smith said.

Haley has seen a lot of on-screen depictions of Cleopatra, which range from Theda Bara in the silent film era to Taylor’s indelible turn to TV adaptations such as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” which starred Janet Suzman as the monarch.

The docudrama, Haley said, “does a good of emphasizing certain aspects of Cleopatra that haven’t been emphasized — the fact that she was a mother, the fact that she could raise an army to take back her rightful place on the throne. In every way, the series emphasizes Cleopatra’s agency.”

The other main difference? In most cinematic depictions, the actress playing her is almost always White.

Greg Carr, an associate professor of Africana studies at Howard University, said “anti-Blackness is the framework” for much of the discourse around Cleopatra and how she should be depicted.

She is mainly “an object of fascination to Europe — to Greece, to Rome — and to the stitched-together history of quote-unquote Western civilization,” Carr said. “That’s why she is the best known of the Egyptian rulers. She’s virtually irrelevant to the long history of Egypt.”

Carr, who was not involved in the docudrama, said casting Cleopatra as a Black woman “has everything to do with contemporary attitudes towards race and conversations about race and very little to do with Cleopatra, whose [full] parentage is lost to history — we just don’t know.”

In a <a href="https://variety.com/2023/tv/global/queen-cleopatra-black-netflix-egypt-1235590708/" target=_blank>guest column for Variety</a>, the show’s director, Tina Gharavi, said her research on the Hellenistic-era queen — who she writes “was eight generations away” from her Ptolemaic ancestors — led her to realize “what a political act it would be to see Cleopatra portrayed by a Black actress.”

The director noted that portrayals of Cleopatra have flouted the historical record. “The HBO series ‘Rome’ portrayed one of the most intelligent, sophisticated and powerful women in the world as a sleazy, dissipated drug addict, yet Egypt didn’t seem to mind,” Gharavi wrote. “Where was the outrage then? But portraying her as Black? Well.”

Current and former government officials have said their main objection is to the “documentary” labeling of “Queen Cleopatra.” They have insisted their objections to the docudrama are not racist, citing <a href="https://www.facebook.com/tourismandantiq/posts/pfbid0ByWrGbPzU8PdRyL6og5LsKUYesxMqBAdPwNVRtLdca9UxHkzd5DipxnQmTtxE8Dzl" target=_blank>statues of Cleopatra</a> as evidence of her non-Black heritage. But as historians have pointed out over the years, the <a href="https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/cleopatra-mythic-temptress/" target=_blank>few historical sources</a> we do have on Cleopatra and other ancient leaders are subject to bias. Plutarch, whose widely translated biographies of Caesar and other Roman and Greek leaders have informed modern takes on Cleopatra, wrote <a href="https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/cleopatra-mythic-temptress/" target=_blank>long after his subjects died</a>.

“That in itself is problematic because it’s hugely biased. It’s not even the life of Cleopatra — she’s embedded in the life of Julius Caesar, in the life of Mark Antony,” Haley said. “In Plutarch’s world, she doesn’t even warrant a life of her own.”

James, the actress who portrays Cleopatra in the docudrama, has been <a href="https://twitter.com/Adele_JJames/status/1653723766172659715" target=_blank>subject to racist vitriol</a> since the trailer dropped last month. Sharing news of the forthcoming series on Instagram, the British actress wrote “I don’t know if there are words powerful enough to express what I hope this will mean for young people all over the world who look like me (and who don’t!), who will now get to grow up seeing the greatest leader of all time … being portrayed by a black-mixed woman on one of the biggest streaming services in the world!”

Netflix, of course, isn’t new to controversy around ethnically ambiguous monarchs who are unapologetically portrayed as Black. “Queen Charlotte,” the “Bridgerton” prequel that premiered on the streamer last week opens with a pointed disclaimer: “This is a story about Queen Charlotte from ‘Bridgerton.’ It is not a history lesson. It is fiction based on fact.”

Though “Queen Cleopatra” is billed as a documentary series, it features an easy-to-miss disclaimer at the bottom of each episode’s credits noting that while the series is “based on true events” some “characters and situations have been altered for dramatization purposes.”

University of Maryland, BA in journalism

Bethonie Butler writes about television and pop culture for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 2010 as a member of the social media team.