(05-24-2023, 11:12 AM)NewJagsCity Wrote:

(05-24-2023, 10:51 AM)NYC4jags Wrote: LOL - Love the Sly Stone reference. Undeniably one cool cat. 

The thing with Cleopatra is that there is no record of her mother's heritage or her grandparents' heritage (paternal side I think)  and therefore having been born in a time of mixed cultures from varied regions blending together - we simply cannot know if there were or were not any sub-Saharan African family members in her family tree. 

Most scholars seem content with the speculation that she was olive-skinned, with a Mesopotamian-dominance in here blend. 

Beyond that, I just don't get the uproar in her being portrayed by a black actress. 
It doesn't have to be "some black activist in Hollyweird trying to get one over on whitey" you know. 
It can just be a creative casting decision. 

And, so what if the director and/or casting director read something about Cleopatra being of a dark skin tone and they believed it. There's a ton of those academic opinions out there. Many will opt to believe the version that suits their narrative. 

We've been watching Samurai movies with Japanese historical figures portrayed by Korean, Chinese and Malaysian actors our entire lives and no one complained. LOL

I am with you on some of this.  I'm not bent over fictional characters changing race / color in movie remakes. And if the race of a historical character is ambiguous, then a fresh racial take is sometimes interesting. If nothing else, it opens up discussion on who these people were and what their places in history were.  But if it's clearly obvious historically (ala Hamilton), then it's just nonsense, IMHO.  That being said, I do look forward to someday seeing a biopic of David Duke played by Denzel Washington or MLK played by Richard B Spencer.  Or even Julius Caesar played by Don Cheadle.  Because the way the Roman Empire absorbed conquered peoples, there had to have been a black Caesar at some point in their history.  They just couldn't find any black marble to immortalize them.

Yes, it can definitely be taken too far. 

The Hamilton thing being a broadway musical written with the intent of blending multi cultural modern music with historical figures makes it an extreme outlier.

But we can certainly point to plenty examples of just plain old "bad casting" or someone taking an intent to include every race imaginable and empowering the women in the story to an extreme  - that they actually hurt the story.

---