On 11 October 2020, it was officially announced that Gal Gadot, a white Israeli actress, had been cast to play the Hellenistic Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII Philopator in an upcoming epic period drama titled Cleopatra, which will be directed by Patty Jenkins and scripted by Laeta Kalogridis. This casting predictably set off outrage on social media over the fact that Cleopatra will not be portrayed by a Black actress.
I’ve already written an entire article in which I discuss Cleopatra’s ancestry and her appearance in great detail. In short, her ancestry was almost entirely Greek and her only known ancestor with non-Greek ancestry was her three times great-grandmother Kleopatra I of Syra, who was of mixed Greek, Persian, and Sogdian ancestry. There is one argument that people have tried to make that Cleopatra’s mother may have been a native Egyptian woman, but it is founded on multiple layers of wishful thinking and dubious assumptions and it is far more likely that her mother was Cleopatra V Tryphaina, her father’s only known wife, who was also his sister or his cousin.
In this article, though, I want to answer a different question: Why Cleopatra? Why is it that, out of three thousand some years of ancient Egyptian history, the only Egyptian queen that Hollywood is interested in making movies about is the one who was definitely of European ancestry? It’s clear that a very large section of the general public wants a movie about a native Egyptian queen portrayed by an actress of color. I say that, if that’s what people want, Hollywood should give that to them. Thankfully, there are plenty of native Egyptian queens and goddesses that Hollywood could potentially make movies about.
A brief review of Cleopatra’s ancestry
Before I launch into that, I want to briefly review some of the main points of the article about Cleopatra that I wrote back in January. Historically speaking, nearly all of Cleopatra’s ancestors originated from the region of Makedonia in what is now northern Greece. She was a member of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, which was founded by Ptolemaios I Soter, one of the generals of King Alexandros III of Makedonia (i.e., the man commonly known in English as “Alexander the Great”).
The Ptolemies were one of the most notoriously inbred dynasties in the ancient world. Kings in this dynasty almost exclusively married their own sisters and their own cousins. As a result, Cleopatra’s whole family tree looks a lot more like a ladder than a tree. She herself married two of her own brothers: Ptolemaios XIII Theos Philopator and Ptolemaios XIV.
ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the territorial extent of the ancient kingdom of Makedonia (labelled here as “Macedonia”) in the year 431 BC on the eve of the Peloponnesian War. Nearly all Cleopatra’s ancestors originated from this region.
We don’t know for certain who Cleopatra’s mother was, but all the available evidence indicates that she was most likely the daughter of Cleopatra V Tryphaina—the only recorded wife of her father Ptolemaios XII Auletes—who was either her father’s sister or his cousin.
The Greek writer Strabon of Amaseia (lived c. 64 BCE – c. 24 CE) writes in his Geographika XVII.1.11 that, of all Ptolemaios XII’s daughters, only the eldest, Cleopatra’s sister Berenike, was legitimate. Strabon, however, is the only ancient writer who ever even hints that Cleopatra was illegitimate. Furthermore, if her illegitimacy was really a well-established fact, then it is baffling that the Romans apparently never used this in their propaganda against her, since it would have been a perfect way of delegitimizing her reign.
There isn’t a clear explanation for how Strabon might have known something about Cleopatra’s parentage that the Romans quite evidently didn’t know. For this reason, it seems likely that Strabon’s claim about Cleopatra being illegitimate is based purely on speculation. Moreover, even if his speculation was right, there is no record of any Ptolemaic king having ever taken a native Egyptian mistress, meaning Cleopatra’s mother still would have most likely been Greek.
Some people have tried to argue that Cleopatra’s mother may have been a native Egyptian woman based on the fact that an early twentieth-century craniometric analysis conducted on the skull of the skeleton of a girl discovered in an octagonal tomb in the city of Ephesos in Asia Minor concluded that the girl in question was of African ancestry and, more recently, some scholars have tried to argue that this skeleton may belong to Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoë IV.
There are all kinds of problems with this argument, though. For one thing, the identification of the skeleton from Ephesos as Arsinoë IV is extremely dubious; the tomb bears no inscription identifying its occupant and the girl who was entombed there was somewhere between twelve and four years younger than Arsinoë IV is thought to have been at the time of her death.
Even if we knew for certain that the skeleton was Arsinoë IV’s, craniometric analysis isn’t always reliable and the skull is currently missing, meaning we don’t even know if the measurements taken in the early twentieth century are accurate. Finally, even if we knew for certain that the skeleton is Arsinoë IV’s and that Arsinoë IV’s mother was indeed Egyptian, we can’t be certain that Cleopatra and Arsinoë had the same mother.
ABOVE: Photograph from this article of the partially reconstructed octagonal tomb at Ephesos that some have speculated might be the tomb of Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoë IV
A brief review of what Cleopatra looked like
Leaving aside the whole matter of Cleopatra’s ancestry, we do have a pretty good impression of what the historical Cleopatra really looked like thanks to the fact that she ruled Egypt for roughly twenty-one years and, during that time, artists produced an extremely large number of portraits of her. There are surviving portraits of her on her coins, surviving portrait busts, surviving wall paintings of her, and so on.
It’s clear from her portraits that Cleopatra looked nothing like how she is typically portrayed in Hollywood films. She had a rather large, hooked nose, a prominent chin, and curly hair, which she seems to have typically worn pulled back into a bun at the back of her head underneath a cloth diadem (a symbol of her authority as queen). Historical records seem to indicate that she was perceived as being small in stature.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the so-called “Berlin Cleopatra,” a marble portrait head of Cleopatra contemporary to her reign
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Berlin Cleopatra from a different angle
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Berlin Cleopatra head-on
ABOVE: Portrait of Cleopatra VII Philopator from one of her coins. Notice the hooked nose, the prominent chin, and the curly hair
Although we can’t know Cleopatra’s exact skin tone, it is likely that it was somewhere between pale and light brown. The pigments on her sculptures haven’t survived, but a fresco from the Roman city of Herculaneum dated to around the first century CE depicts a redheaded, pale-skinned woman who is identifiable as a Ptolemaic queen by the diadem she wears and by the Egyptian motifs that surround her. The queen in the fresco is shown with Cleopatra’s signature hairstyle and a hooked nose, leading many scholars to believe she is supposed to be Cleopatra herself.
Even if the queen in the fresco is supposed to be Cleopatra, though, we can’t be sure that the depiction is accurate, since it was certainly painted long after her death and the artist who created it certainly never saw her in person. People from the lands north of Greece had a reputation in antiquity for having red hair, so it’s possible that the artist may have simply known that Cleopatra’s ancestors came from northern Greece and therefore imagined her with red hair. Pale skin was also regarded as a feminine feature, so the artist may have chosen to make her pale to emphasize her femininity.
In any case, leaving that aside, I certainly think that, as far as historical accuracy is concerned, Gal Gadot—who is straight-haired, small-nosed, extraordinarily tall, pale-skinned, and very conventionally beautiful by twenty-first-century white American standards—was probably not the best pick to portray Cleopatra. Obviously, though, historical accuracy means nothing to Hollywood. If they really cared about historical accuracy, then movies like 300—which I thoroughly debunk in this article from November 2019—would not exist.
ABOVE: Fresco from the Roman city of Herculaneum dated to the first century CE, depicting a pale, redheaded Ptolemaic queen with Cleopatra’s signature hairstyle and hooked nose
Why portraying Cleopatra as a Black Egyptian woman might not be a good idea
There are legitimate arguments for portraying Cleopatra as a Black woman in a film even though she almost certainly wasn’t one historically. There are also, however, some legitimate reasons why making Cleopatra a Black Egyptian woman might not be a good idea.
The first problem with making Cleopatra a Black native Egyptian woman is that it would gloss over a rather disturbing aspect of who she really was. Although things are complicated, it would not be entirely inaccurate to think of Ptolemaic Egypt as a colonialist regime.
It’s true that the Ptolemies did try to portray themselves as Egyptian to their Egyptian subjects. It’s also true that they did not try to suppress Egyptian culture and, in fact, supported the construction of traditional temples to the Egyptian deities. Nonetheless, they were still foreign rulers who demanded obedience from their native subjects. They were willing to use violence to force their subjects into submission and they sought to exploit the land they ruled for their own personal benefit.
Although Cleopatra did learn the Egyptian language—something no other member of her family had ever done—she was still essentially a foreign queen; she still conducted most business in her native Greek, she still portrayed herself as a Greek queen to the wider world, and she still probably thought of herself as a Greek queen. Portraying Cleopatra as a Black Egyptian woman, then, would be a questionable decision because it would arguably be concealing the uncomfortable proto-colonialist nature of her regime.
ABOVE: Egyptian court document dated to February 33 BCE in the Greek language, bearing the Greek word γινέσθωι (“make it happen”) at the bottom in Cleopatra’s own handwriting
How stories about Cleopatra have historically been used to justify patriarchy
We also need to remember that a large part of the reason why Cleopatra’s story has been told so many times is because of how the story ends; she and her ally Marcus Antonius were defeated by the Roman general Octavian—a European man who would probably be considered “white” if he were alive today—and they were both forced to commit suicide. Octavian annexed Cleopatra’s entire kingdom and became the first emperor of the Roman Empire.
Roman writers and poets from the reign of Augustus onwards retold the story of his victory over Cleopatra and Marcus Antonius over and over again and it became part of the mythology of the Roman imperialist regime. The poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (lived 39 – 65 CE), for instance, wrote an epic poem titled Pharsalia in which he attempts to portray Cleopatra as a dangerous, seductive easterner.
It is partly on account of these Roman stories that Cleopatra is so famous today. Even now, part of the reason why the story of Cleopatra has been told so many times in modernity is because it has been seen as reinforcing the idea that women are inherently unfit to rule. Even adaptations of the Cleopatra story from the twenty-first century are still generally redolent with misogynist attitudes towards female rulers.
This is the reason why, even though Cleopatra was actually a remarkably talented and resilient ruler who managed to maintain control over Egypt for many years despite the incredibly dangerous political climate of her time, the only thing that most people remember about her is the legend of how she supposedly committed suicide by allowing an Egyptian asp to bite her on the breast.
The story about the asp has been immortalized in everything from William Shakespeare’s tragedy Antony and Cleopatra to the LEGO minifigure of Cleopatra, which portrays her holding a green snake. Nonetheless, the story is almost certainly apocryphal; as I explain in this article from August 2019, it is far more likely that Cleopatra committed suicide either by drinking poison or by cutting herself on the arm and applying poison to the wound.
If someone makes a film portraying Cleopatra as a Black woman and the film tells the story of her entire life, then they would effectively end up making a movie about how a Black woman was defeated by a white man. This problem does not seem to have occurred to most of people who are acting outraged over the fact that film studios aren’t casting Black actresses to play Cleopatra.
ABOVE: First-century CE Roman fresco from the House of Giuseppe II in Pompeii depicting Cleopatra wearing her royal diadem, about to drink a cup of poison. Her son Kaisarion stands behind her, also wearing his royal diadem.
Why there might be better ideas than making another movie about Cleopatra
Cleopatra lived a very interesting life and I do think that her story is worth retelling, but I don’t think that what the public really wants right now is a movie about a Greek queen ruling over Egypt in a time of great political turmoil before ultimately being defeated by a white male and forced to commit suicide to avoid humiliation. Judging from all the outraged posts and articles I’ve read, it seems that what the public really wants right now is a movie about a powerful woman of color successfully ruling over her native land of Egypt.
It therefore seems to me that Cleopatra is simply not the woman that the public wants to see a movie about right now. Fortunately, there are plenty of real, native Egyptian queens that filmmakers could be making movies about instead. For instance, they could be making a movie about Hatshepsut (lived c. 1507 – c. 1458 BCE), who was a native Egyptian and may very well have been what we would consider Black.
Unfortunately, we don’t know a whole lot about what Hatshepsut looked like, since all surviving artistic depictions of her are highly conventionalized, but, as I discuss in this article from April 2020, there were definitely plenty of people in Egypt at the time of Hatshepsut whom we would consider Black and there’s no reason to think that she couldn’t have been one of them. It’s almost certain that, at the very least, she was what we would consider a woman of color.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Egyptian statue of the pharaoh Hatshepsut. If you want a movie about a powerful woman of color ruling over her native land, why not make one about Hatshepsut?
It is true that we don’t know nearly as much about Hatshepsut’s life as we do about Cleopatra’s. It is also true that Cleopatra lived during a much more turbulent time in Egyptian history than Hatshepsut did, meaning her life naturally involved a lot more documented drama and intrigue.
Nonetheless, there’s still a lot about Hatshepsut’s reign that could be made interesting, such as her struggles to be accepted as a woman ruler in a land that had been customarily ruled by men, her trade expedition to the land of Punt, and her ambitious building projects. Indeed, I think a lot of people are already interested in Hatshepsut. The Egyptologist Kara Cooney even managed to write a bestselling book about her back in 2015. I have a copy of it on my bookshelf.
If Hollywood struggles to find material about Hatshepsut to make interesting, I’m sure they won’t have any qualms about just making stuff up. In some ways, the lack of reliable information may be liberating for them, since it means they can totally make up whole story arcs and situations and no one will be able to definitively prove that those things didn’t really happen.
I mean, for goodness sakes, Spike TV seriously made an entire three-episode miniseries based on the life of Tutankhamun, a minor puppet king who ascended to the throne when he was around eight or nine years old and ruled in name only for about nine years. Hatshepsut ruled for about twenty-one years and she was an adult the whole time. If you can find (or make up) enough material about Tutankhamun to do a whole miniseries about him, you can easily do the same thing for Hatshepsut.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a statue of Hatshepsut currently held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
If, for some reason, filmmakers don’t like Hatshepsut, there are also plenty of interesting women in Egyptian mythology, including the goddess Isis—who was associated with healing, motherhood, and funerary practices—and the goddess Hathor—who was associated with sexuality, beauty, and fertility.
Hollywood has already demonstrated its willingness to make films based on Egyptian mythology; in 2016, Lionsgate released the film Gods of Egypt. That film has received widespread and well-deserved backlash for its overwhelmingly white cast and it frankly wasn’t a very good film otherwise, since it was overly reliant on special effects and the writing wasn’t especially good. The only real highlight of the film was Chadwick Boseman’s performance as Thoth, the god of wisdom, contemplating the essence of lettuce.
Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean that someone couldn’t make a truly outstanding film based on Egyptian mythology. I could definitely see someone making a compelling film about the goddess Isis, starring an actress of color. (Although, for the purposes of the film, they might want to consider using the goddess’s Egyptian name Aset, to avoid confusion with a different ISIS.)
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a seventh-century BCE Egyptian statuette of the goddess Isis nursing her son Horus
Conclusion
To be very clear, I’m not saying that no one should ever make movies about Cleopatra; I’m just saying that Cleopatra isn’t the only interesting woman in Egyptian history and another movie about her doesn’t seem to be what the public wants right now at this particular moment.
Maybe, when there are some more movies out there about other ancient Egyptian queens, then it will be time for someone to make another movie about Cleopatra. Right now, though, it seems like Hollywood is too fixated on one particular story.
“ Cleopatra isn’t the only interesting woman in Egyptian history and another movie about her doesn’t seem to be what the public wants right now at this particular moment.”
I suspect the problem you have is you are unusually interested in classical history. Most people aren’t, however a lot of them will have heard of Cleopatra. Hollywood is a business. It’s not about improving people’s knowledge of the Classical period, that is your job!
You say another movie about Cleopatra is not what people want, how do you know? Is there evidence that the ‘public’ want a movie about any Egyptian woman outside of a tiny academic community?
Cleopatra is the last of the Ptolemies, the Macedonian Dynasty that ruled Egypt. All the rulers of the Dynasty were of pure Macedonian ethnic stock!
Cleopatra was the most illustrious of the Ptolemies. Had she and Mark Antony won in Actium in 31 BCE the whole World History would be totally different.
Her Life and deeds are far more interesting than the Life of any other Female in the World History. The existing material about her is vast (!!we even have something written by her own hand)!! Hundreds of biographies by experts have been written and hundreds more are around the corner.
That Hollywood is producing one more film should not come as a surprise.
The surprise is that Netflix does not produce a series of at least 100 episodes about Cleopatra that would make The Game of Thrones look like a failure!
But to suggest that Hollywood should make a film about Hatshepsut instead comes as a real surprise. Hatshepsut who? would be a common reaction to anyone involved in the production and even the potential spectators.
I do not believe, as you suggest, that the author of the article has a keen interest in the Classical History. Neither the Hellenistic Egypt nor the Roman one. As I was surfing, before reaching this article about Cleopatra, I was astonished to read another strange article about Hypatia’s ‘colour’ !
It seems that the author has an axe to grind. Afrocentrism?
Excellent summary of the issues around the obsession with Cleopatra in European culture. Although you do touch upon it, I think it is worth emphasising more the underlying, often unconscious, misogyny at the heart of this fascination. Our male-dominated culture relishes stories of uppity women who get their comeuppance. Although it is not the whole story, misogyny was certainly an element in the rejection of Hilary Clinton, and it is rearing its ugly head again in responses to Kamala Harris. It’s interesting that there is a push to retell the Cleopatra story at precisely the same time as a strong woman is making her presence felt in American politics. And one accused by her enemies of manipulating an older man. Curious.
“It’s interesting that there is a push to retell the Cleopatra story at precisely the same time as a strong woman is making her presence felt in American politics. And one accused by her enemies of manipulating an older man.”
Or, the more mundane explanation is that (A.) historical epics are popular (see Gladiator, Alexander the Great, or The Gods of Egypt); (B.) Most everyone knows something about Cleopatra because of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra; (C.) Hollywood likes remaking older movies or rebooting franchises because they have built-in name recognition.
I don’t think we need to invoke conspiracy theories to explain the production of this movie.
I don’t think I used the word ‘conspiracy’. What I’m talking about here is cultural forces that often operate unconsciously. Ignore them at your peril. Especially in Trump’s America.
Yes I think you are right. The simple reason is often the correct one.
“Judging from all the outraged posts and articles I’ve read, it seems that what the public really wants right now is a movie about a powerful woman of color successfully ruling over her native land of Egypt.”
Spencer, this is an example of selection bias. The kind of people who complain on the internet don’t necessarily represent the general public.
In any case, I for one think that the purpose of a movie is simply to *entertain* people—not to give them moral instruction or shape their political beliefs. A movie is not a political tract and people who think otherwise are misguided.
I miss the days when only real actors and actresses would be cast to play somebody as opposed to anybody who just happened to “look” a certain skin color. I suppose only real convicted felons and serial killers should be able to portray someone like Walter White or Hannibal Lecter. This is what happens when people don’t read their primary sources. Why does Pilate get to be white but not Jesus? Its scary how accurate Bradbury was in the 1950s. Hopefully this madness will end and we can go back to casting people based off of talent and not mere skin color.
Hollywood has been casting people based on skin color since its very beginning. The only difference is that, back in the old days, the only skin color they would allow for lead roles was white. Watch any old movie or television show from the 1950s and count how many actors there are who aren’t white. Chances are, there won’t be any. If there are any, chances are they’ll be playing an enslaved character or another character who is in some position of subservience. The idea that people were ever cast in films solely on the basis of objective acting abilities is ridiculous. The situation is changing, but the old prejudices against casting people of color still haven’t totally died out.
I agree with all of your points, but the worst of it is that Cleopatra’s southern neighbours, the Kushites, actually were ruled by a Black woman during that period.
Kandake Amanirenas of Kush fought a five year war against the Romans after Cleopatra’s death, which ended in peace treaty that was favourable to the Kushites – she got the better of Augustus.
You’re absolutely right! I should have mentioned something about her in this article.
Sometimes I just don’t understand Hollywood. A 30 minute Wikiwalk could give them all this information. If it is about the name recognition of Cleopatra, they could even do a double headline piece featuring the relation between the two queens, in the style of the (commercially succesful) media about Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor.
After all, we don’t really know a lot about Amanirenas teenage years, and a screenwriter could fill that in as they pleased.
But then, they also messed up Homer repeatedly, especially the Brad Pitt vehicle, and completely missed the obvious ways to make it relevant. The production was roughly contemporary to the Joseph Kony child soldier scandal – and Hollywood completely missed that all the ancient sources describe Achilles as a boy in his early teens, young enough to pass for a girl involuntarily!
Yet they never even tried the child soldier angle.
Very much enjoyed this article. Would love to talk to you about it. Email me if you’re up for Cleopatra chatting. Could be fun…
I like (especially on the “Byzantines“) most of your ancient history posts even if I don’t completely agree with what you write but I`m beginning to see a pattern on how you think.
Everything seems to be about skin color. Seriously I’m sick of everything coming down to color. You become part of the problem when all you focus on is color.
You seem to love ancient Greece. You once wrote that ancient Greeks and Romans did not look at skin color , maybe you should do the same?
And about Hollywood? They have no imagination anymore, it has been that way for a long time. All they do is recycle the same ideas over and over. Only the actors change.
The reason why I write so much about race and skin color is not because I personally have any kind of perverse obsession with race, nor is it because I think “everything comes down to color.” The reason I do it is because, quite simply, racism is such a defining and ubiquitous force in contemporary culture, especially the American culture in which I live, and I desire to combat racism in whatever ways I can. When people say that they “don’t see color,” most of the time what they really mean is that they are very good at ignoring racism and pretending as though it simply does not exist.