“Queen Cleopatra,” Netflix’s four-part documentary on perhaps the most famous Queen of Egypt, has been very poorly reviewed.
On Rotten Tomatoes it currently has a tomatometer score of 10%, meaning official reviews have been terrible. But it also has a 2% audience score, meaning that the overwhelming majority of non-professional users who bothered reviewing the show themselves hated it too.
But no doubt you’ve seen by now how the show’s star and creators have had to push back against much of the reaction to the show, and the star herself has been harassed. So what’s going on?
It’s complex, but in short, while yes, there are sincere critiques of the show’s historical inaccuracies and the production itself, there is also a separate backlash that is unmistakably racist. Let’s dive in.
Racism
“Queen Cleopatra” focuses on many of the things people know about her. Her rise to power in Egypt, her deft political and social maneuvering, and the dangerous alliances and relationships she struck in her efforts to gain and keep power and keep Egypt independent from Rome. This culminated with her entering the last of Republican Rome’s many civil wars on the side of her lover, Marc Antony, and ended with her death in 31 B.C. by suicide after Antony’s rival, Octavian, utterly defeated them.
The show adopts a revisionist historical take on the monarch, depicting her as a Black woman, played by actress Adele James. Which means you can probably guess the sad direction this is headed.
Even before the show came out, it was subjected to an avalanche of hateful remarks. The problem was so bad that Netflix was forced to turn off comments on the trailer’s YouTube page. And James herself was subjected to racist harassment, screenshots of which she posted on Twitter in April.
Similarly racist sentiments about James and the show can be easily found on Twitter — we won’t link to that though — yet another example of the rise in hate speech on the platform since it was purchased by Elon Musk.
Audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes are harder to nail down — the site has much stricter content policies than Twitter does, thanks to a vicious sexist harassment campaign directed against a female film critic who gave “Marvel’s the Avengers” a mediocre score back in 2012.
In response to the backlash against the trailer, Tina Gharavi, the series’ director, asked viewers and historians in a Variety op-ed, “What bothers you so much about a Black Cleopatra?” Gharavi argued that James looks more like Cleopatra than Elizabeth Taylor, who portrayed the queen in 1963’s “Cleopatra.” Gharavi also pointed out the lack of uproar following HBO’s portrayal of Cleopatra on the series “Rome,” in which she was played by English actress Lyndsey Marshal.
“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 said. “Where was the outrage then? But portraying her as Black? Well.”
Historical inaccuracies
Several historians have called out the show’s inaccuracies, including how her race is depicted. As historians have noted, Cleopatra was the last monarch in a dynasty descended from Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian Greek who served as one of Alexander the Great’s generals.
And as Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities wrote in a statement on their website, “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 on Facebook 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.”
But for what it’s worth, despite her well-documented life, knowledge about Cleopatra is still very incomplete. Her dynasty was destroyed when she lost her war with Rome — and that’s on top of numerous riots in Egypt that destroyed records. And while there are representations of her confirmed to have been made in her lifetime — this bust is supposed to be the most accurate that survives — most writing about her is from much later writers.
If the Greek historian Plutarch, who wrote about 150 years after her death, was accurate, then she was the first of the Ptolemaic line to bother learning the Egyptian language. Regardless of what she may or may not have looked like, she may indeed have thought of herself first and foremost as Egyptian.
Sincerely bad reviews
But yes there are, in fact, legitimate bad reviews for this show that aren’t focused on casting.
“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).
