“Queen Cleopatra,” Netflix’s four-part documentary on the most famous Queen of Egypt, has been very poorly reviewed.
On Rotten Tomatoes it currently has a tomatometer score of 10%, which means official reviews have been terrible, and it has a 2% audience score, as non-professional users have also panned it
But the show’s star and creators have publicly called out critics, and star Adele James has been harassed. So what’s going on?
It’s complex but in short, there is legitimate criticism of the show’s historical inaccuracies and production values, and also a separate backlash that is unmistakably racist. Let’s dive in.
Racism
“Queen Cleopatra” covers the things most people know about her: the vicious familial rivalries she navigated in her rise to power in Egypt; her role in the final civil wars of the Roman Republic, first as Julius Caesar’s lover and, after his assassination, his general Marc Antony’s wife; their disastrous war against Caesar’s heir Octavian that ended in crushing defeat in 31 B.C.E., after which she died by suicide at just 39 years old and Rome annexed Egypt.
The show also advances a revisionist historical depiction of Cleopatra as a Black woman, played by James. You can probably guess the sad direction this is headed.
A racist backlash began even before the show came out. The problem was so bad that Netflix was forced to turn off comments on the trailer’s YouTube page, and James was subjected to a harassment campaign, screenshots of which she posted on Twitter.
Similarly racist sentiments can be easily found on Twitter — we won’t link to them — yet another example of the rise in hate speech on the platform since it was purchased by Elon Musk.
However, it’s not so simple on Rotten Tomatoes where, in response to a vicious sexist harassment campaign against a film critic over her “Marvel’s the Avengers” review in 2012, there are much stricter user content policies.
Historians and even Egypt’s ministry of tourism have also criticized the show on grounds that are absolutely not racist (more on that shortly).
In response to the backlash, series director Tina Gharavi wrote a Variety op-ed, “What bothers you so much about a Black Cleopatra?” where she argued that James looks more like Cleopatra than Elizabeth Taylor, who portrayed the queen in 1963’s “Cleopatra.”
Gharavi also complained that the portrayal of Cleopatra by English actress Lyndsey Marshal “as a sleazy, dissipated drug addict” on the HBO series “Rome” didn’t spark a backlash, and suggested even Egyptian critics might somehow objecting for racist reasons.
Historical inaccuracies
Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities explained, “there are many antiquities of Queen Cleopatra, including statues and depictions on coins that confirm the shape and true features of her. All of which show the Hellenistic (Greek) features of Queen Cleopatra in terms of fair skin, drawn nose and thin lips.”
Zahi Hawass, the former Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs in Egypt, wrote that “the film that is coming on Netflix is not accurate” and that “Cleopatra was Greek and she was similar to the queens and princesses of Macedonia.”
Islam Issa, a historian who wrote the book “Alexandria: The City That Changed the World,” and was a contributor to the documentary, wrote in an article for Al Jazeera that while Cleopatra’s Macedonian-Greek background is “beyond doubt,” he did clarify that it’s difficult to assign modern concepts of race to Cleopatra’s ethnicity.
“The largely binary racial terms being used today are anachronistic and can hardly be applied to Cleopatra’s context,” Issa wrote. “With the exception of Jews, ethnicities weren’t really recorded in early Egyptian history. 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.”
“To claim that Egypt had no dark-skinned people in it, or that the origins of Egyptian civilizations were fundamentally sub-Saharan African, are essentially both forms of erasure.”
It’s worth noting that there really isn’t evidence that critics of the Netflix series have claimed Egypt had “no dark-skinned people.” Also worth noting that Greeks of the time did have well-documented sense of themselves as a distinct people, though this concept was rooted more in cultural and linguistic links than any kind of racial ethnicity in the modern sense.
And it must be understood that our knowledge about Cleopatra, like most ancient figures, is very incomplete due to the loss of so many ancient records; in fact, the majority of surviving ancient sources about her were written decades or centuries later, by writers using primary sources that have since been lost.
What is indisputable is that Cleopatra — as queen she was known as Cleopatra Thea Philopator (Cleopatra, “goddess who loves her father”) — was a direct descendant of Ptolemy I Soter, the Macedonian Greek General who seized Egypt during the civil wars that erupted after Alexander the Great’s death, and established a dynasty that would last 275 years.
Ptolemy’s wife, Bernice, was a fellow Macedonian, and his descendants at first married within the royal families of the neighboring Greek monarchies founded by some of Alexander’s other generals. Later, for reasons that are unclear, they adopted the custom of brother-sister incest traditionally practiced by Egyptian pharaohs. And yes, it’s very likely Cleopatra’s mother was her father’s sister, though it isn’t known for certain.
What comes down to us from later writers is that like all other Ptolemaic rulers, her first language was Koine Greek (the ancestor of modern Greek). But if the historian Plutarch, writing about 150 years after her death, was accurate, Cleopatra was also the first of the Ptolemaic line to bother learning Egyptian. She was also reported to speak Ethiopian, Hebrew, Arabic and Syrian, among others.
That said, representations of Cleopatra confirmed to have been made in her lifetime or immediately after her death have survived. Whatever she thought of herself, she was usually depicted in Hellenistic hairstyles and clothing. This bust for example, which is supposed to be the most accurate surviving depiction, is of a decidedly European-looking woman.
There are also depictions of her in traditional Egyptian styles and art, though these appear to be part of the Ptolemaic dynasty’s assertion of continuity with the long-deposed native Pharaohs. Regardless of what she may or may not have looked like, it’s possible she thought of herself as Egyptian.
Sincerely bad reviews
But yes there are, in fact, legitimate bad reviews for this show that aren’t focused on casting or history.
“The scripts set up a thesis — that she was an agent of her own destiny, not just swept along with it, that she was accomplished, learned and cunning and Black — and never quite closes the deal,” one reviewer wrote.
“James does a good job… Unfortunately, the rest of the cast play their parts like they’re in something more akin to Caligula than a serious examination of Cleopatra’s life,” wrote another.
But as we noted above, the 10 negative reviews from critics are a drop in the bucket.
“Queen Cleopatra” is the second season of executive producer Jada Pinkett Smith’s documentary series, titled “African Queens.” The first season, “Njinga,” focusing on the life of Queen Njinga of Angola, was also largely panned by audiences, receiving a 12% audience score (though it does maintain an 88% critics score).
