![]() Yet despite their solid credentials and insight into her origins, the talking heads regularly feel more like fans than historians. Identifying her as one thing or another amounts to little more than guesswork and presumes that race is, or ever was, a fixed concept. Dr Islam Issa says he imagines her as having the same pale brown skin and curly hair as he does. The African American academic Prof Shelley P Haley says that, like her grandmother, she pictures her as Black. In fact, it suggests that people tend to view Cleopatra as their proxy. ![]() ![]() The series puts little stock in the particular skin colour of its lead, given the uncertainty of her appearance. It’s hard not to feel that she is the programme’s greatest strength. James folds the Queen’s inner turmoil into every step of her journey, from a naive princess poring over text in the Alexandria libraries to a formidable queen who would rather die than succumb to a life in bondage. In this docudrama, she is played by Adele James, a mixed-race actor with a glorious crown of dark curls who brings a fierce intelligence to her portrayal of Cleopatra. Cultural acceptance of an image of a beautiful white woman with a straight jet-black bob does not make it a fact, as her portraits of the era are limited to the sides of coins, and tales of her stunning looks were written hundreds of years after her death. Cleopatra’s precise skin and hair texture are up for speculation, but to default to whiteness is insidious and ridiculous. But while that uncertainty opens her up to being played by any number of actors, it is notable that some see blue-eyed Elizabeth Taylor and Israeli Wonder Woman Gal Gadot as more accurate. Her Macedonian roots had spent eight generations in Egypt at the time of her birth, and many of the specifics of her family tree have been lost to the annals of time. This insistence on her whiteness is curious, as much of her lineage (including her mother’s race) is unknown. The biggest buzz about Netflix’s latest comes from casting a Cleopatra with light brown skin and curly hair – it met with uproar from those who insisted that she couldn’t possibly be Black. ![]() It’s a deliciously fun drama weighed down by the self-serious need to educate. Executive producer Jada Pinkett Smith delivers the narration with such sombre self-righteousness that it sucks the joy out of the atmosphere. Despite these historians’ impressive credentials, the drama outshines the testimony at every turn. Netflix’s docudrama Queen Cleopatra tries to have its cake and eat it too: it has all the campy fun of Cleopatra the soap opera in dramatic re-enactments, but intersperses them with straight-faced expertise from academic talking heads. T here’s often a debate about whether real-life subjects are better suited for drama or documentary treatment, the core (but admittedly oversimplified) belief being that documentaries serve primarily to educate while drama serves to entertain. ![]()
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