Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The trouble with Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra

Adele James starring as Queen Cleopatra (Credit: Netflix)

It’s the worst thing to happen to Cleopatra since that snake in the mausoleum. Queen Cleopatra is the second season of African Queens, a revisionist Netflix strand touting itself as a documentary series on black monarchs.

Produced and narrated by Jada Pinkett Smith, it is an attempt to repackage history for a contemporary audience. Queen Cleopatra purports to explore ‘the real woman’ and ‘her truth’ as a female warrior who ‘bowed to no man’. Cleopatra was a tenacious leader and a canny strategist but her reign ended in suicide after her defeat to Octavian at Actium destroyed the Ptolemaic dynasty. No doubt there’s an audience for kickass girlboss history but there’s a reason Plutarch’s Life of Antony is light on the ‘yaas, kween, slay!’.

In kicking the hornets’ nest of identity politics, producers know they can generate a reaction from cultural out-groups

Then again, maybe there’s not much of an audience. Queen Cleopatra has bombed with critics and viewers alike. Rotten Tomatoes records a 14 per cent score among the former and just three per cent among the latter. Camilla Long in the Sunday Times brands it ‘patchy sub-Game of Thrones cosplay interwoven with academics you’ve never heard of’. Rohan Naahar of the Indian Express says it ‘tells the legendary monarch’s tale with all the dramatic heft of a Wikipedia article’. But if Queen Cleopatra fails as a historical documentary and as entertainment, it fails even harder as a political project, and not merely in its Teen Vogue feminism. 

The series sets out to jam events and personalities of classical antiquity into the framework of progressive identitarianism, not least by casting a biracial British actress, Adele James, in the lead role. The dominant historiography records Cleopatra as Macedonian-Greek, though mystery surrounds her mother’s origins and some black commentators have posited that she could have been African. Netflix says that while Cleopatra’s ethnicity is ‘not the focus’ of the series, ‘we did intentionally decide to depict her of mixed ethnicity to reflect theories about Cleopatra’s possible Egyptian ancestry and the multicultural nature of ancient Egypt’.

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