Queen Cleopatra director says Black star looks more like the ruler 'than Elizabeth Taylor ever did'

What did Cleopatra look like? Millennia after the historical figure reigned as queen of Egypt, the question is still hotly debated by academics and artists.

Earlier this month, Netflix unveiled the trailer for Queen Cleopatra, a new season of Jada Pinkett Smith's African Queens docudrama anthology that explores the histories of various rulers from the continent. The casting of Black actress Adele James in the titular role was a bold choice — and a provocative one that has caused some backlash from Egyptians, including at least one legal complaint.

In a guest essay for Variety, Queen Cleopatra director Tina Gharavi responds to the casting criticism, saying that her team strove to make up for the inaccuracies of previous films that depicted the Egyptian queen as white.

"After much hang-wringing and countless auditions, we found in Adele James an actor who could convey not only Cleopatra's beauty, but also her strength," Gharavi wrote. "What the historians can confirm is that it is more likely that Cleopatra looked like Adele than Elizabeth Taylor ever did."

Taylor played the lead role in 1963's Cleopatra, one of the most expensive films ever made. Monica Bellucci played the queen in the 2002 French comedy Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra. In 2020, it was revealed that Gal Gadot would play Cleopatra in a film from Patty Jenkins and Kari Skogland. "We're going to show not just how sexy and appealing she was, but how strategic and smart, and how much impact she had and still has on the world we're living in today," Gadot said in a 2022 interview. "I've watched all the Cleopatra movies throughout history, but I feel like we're telling the story the world needs to hear now."

In a statement to Tudum earlier this month, Queen Cleopatra producers said "her ethnicity is not the focus of Queen Cleopatra, but we did intentionally decide to depict her of mixed ethnicity to reflect theories about Cleopatra's possible Egyptian ancestry and the multicultural nature of ancient Egypt."

Queen Cleopatra will rule over Netflix on May 10.

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• The on-screen history of Cleopatra