Who plays Cleopatra in Netflix?

Adele James is a British actress and screenwriter who plays Cleopatra in the 2023, Netflix docuseries, Queen Cleopatra.

The new Netflix series is set to premier on May 10 2023. It depicts the Queen of Egypt’s Ptolemaic Kingdom from 51 to 30 B.C.

However, even before the series began, its trailer created quite a stir. Why? Adele James, who describes herself as a “bi-racial woman” in an interview with the UK’s Express, has taken on the lead role.

Egyptian lawyer Mahmoud al-Semary filed a complaint with the public prosecutor’s office requesting that Netflix be blocked, claiming that casting Cleopatra as a Black woman would “distort and erase Egypt’s identity.”

According to historians, including Egyptologist and former Minister of Antiquities Zahi Hawass, “Cleopatra was Greek, which means she was fair-skinned, not black.”

However, The director, Gharavi, points out that Cleopatra’s family had been in Egypt for 300 years at the time of her birth: “So Cleopatra was black?” We don’t know for certain, but she was not white like Elizabeth Taylor.”

The director wants to talk about the “internalised white supremacy that Hollywood has indoctrinated us with.”

Casting Adele James in the role was described by Netflix as a “creative decision” that should be interpreted as “alluding to the centuries-old debate about the ethnicity of the ruler” as well as Egypt’s multicultural population at the time.

Cleopatra was a descendant of the Ptolemaic dynasty’s founder, Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian-Greek general and Alexander the Great’s companion.

But no one knows what Cleopatra actually looked like. Meanwhile, her mother’s ethnicity is unknown.