Hollywood, it seems, isn’t going to stop until the world throws history out the window and accepts that Cleopatra, Egypt’s Ptolemaic queen of Macedonian Greek decent, was a black woman.
Zendaya — whose mother is of German and Scottish descent, and whose father is an African-American with Nigerian ancestry — has just been cast to play the iconic queen, just months after Jada Pinkett Smith’s miniseries featuring a black actress in the starring role bombed spectacularly on Netflix.
“So, apparently, thanks to Hollywood, it’s just an established fact at this point that Cleopatra was in fact black, and if you don’t like it, well, then you’re clearly a racist,” Blaze Media’s Lauren Chen sarcastically stated.
(Video: YouTube)
Denis Villeneuve, who directed Zendaya in the two-film adaptation of “Dune,” will lead the biopic, Newsweek reports, adding that the production “has been in the works for years.”
“Earlier this year, we were gifted by the cringe content gods a Netflix miniseries that claimed to be a documentary focusing on the life of the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra,” Chen said, adding that it “received a lot of flak” for the casting as the lead black British actress Adele James.
“Now I’m not a historian, nor do I claim to be,” Chen said. “However, according to people who are actual historians, there’s really not a lot of debate out there. … Cleopatra was not black; she was in fact Greek, and we know this not only because we are familiar with Cleopatra’s lineage but because we also have in our possession actual busts of what she looked like.”
The host displayed a photo of one such bust.
“Clearly, this is not a black woman by any stretch of the imagination,” she stated.
Most disturbing about the Netflix disaster is that it claimed to be a “documentary,” Chen noted.
“Debate surrounding the series really revolved around the concept of blackwashing, i.e. taking figures who were not black but making them black in order to have increased diversity and representation,” she explained.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Chen said, “I think Zendaya is not only a beautiful actress but also a talented one. However, I think it’s safe to say that not every actor or actress is suitable for every role.”
“I don’t believe that it’s necessary for the actress who is playing Cleopatra to be actually ethnically Greek,” she said, “[but] I think it’s pretty reasonable to want an actress who could at least pass for being Greek.”
Noting that “Timothée Chalamet has been offered the role of Octavius, and Daniel Craig might be playing Caesar,” Chen argued that this isn’t a case of “race-blind casting.”
“It seems like for the not-Cleopatra characters, they’re actually going for people who could reasonably and ethnically look like the figures they’re portraying,” she said. “That leads me to believe that, no, this is not about race-blind casting.”
“This is about a concerted effort to blackwash Cleopatra and almost rewrite history,” she said. “At least in pop culture, to have people actually believe that Cleopatra was black or at least partly black.”
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