There’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. 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. Despite these historians’ impressive credentials, the drama outshines the testimony at every turn. Executive producer Jada Pinkett Smith delivers the narration with such sombre self-righteousness that it sucks the joy out of the atmosphere. It’s a deliciously fun drama weighed down by the self-serious need to educate.
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. This insistence on her whiteness is curious, as much of her lineage (including her mother’s race) is unknown. 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. 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. Cleopatra’s precise skin and hair texture are up for speculation, but to default to whiteness is insidious and ridiculous. 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.
