() Adele James addressed the controversy surrounding the skin color of her Cleopatra character in a new Netflix docuseries.
“Queen Cleopatra,” produced and narrated by Jada Pinkett Smith, portrays the sovereign of the Ptolemaic Egyptian kingdom as a woman of color.
Egyptian officials have criticized the casting of James, who is biracial, for the role. The actress addressed the controversy in a recent appearance on “The Wayne Ayers Podcast.”
“Blackwashing doesn’t exist, right?” he said. “I find it sad that people have so much self-hatred or feel so threatened by blackness that they need to do that, to separate Egypt from the rest of the continent,” she added.
James mentioned the word ‘blackwashing’ as opposed to the term ‘whitewashing’, used to refer to when white actors are cast to play black people.
Now, the debate is not new.
Cleopatra has been played by a number of women, including Elizabeth Taylor in a 1963 film.
In 2020, there were complaints of “whitewashing” at the news that actress Gal Gadot, of Israeli origin and star of “Wonder Woman”, had been chosen to play Cleopatra in an upcoming film.
At the center of debate among historians has been whether Cleopatra, who came from a long line of Macedonian Greeks, had darker skin due to her African ancestry.
Those in favor of believing that it was, point out that Egypt is part of the African continent.
“Queen Cleopatra” is part of Pinkett Smith’s “African Queens” franchise. In a article Posted last month on Netflix’s Tudum site, the series’ producers addressed the ethnicity of the royals.
“Her ethnicity is not the central theme of ‘Queen Cleopatra,’ but we intentionally chose to portray her as a mixed ethnicity to reflect theories about Cleopatra’s possible Egyptian ancestry and the multicultural nature of Ancient Egypt,” they explained.
has contacted representatives for Netflix and Pinkett Smith for comment.
“Queen Cleopatra” is now available on Netflix.
