Kudos to Egypt for actually doing this.

Netflix: We're making Cleopatra black. Egypt: *We know our own history*

Cleopatra is not a fictional character. She was a real historical figure. That is the difference.

To hear the actress call the ENTIRETY OF THE NATIVE COUNTRY racist because they want proper representation is quite possibly the most moronic thing I’ve witnessed.

The amount of racism you need to change the race of a historical character and then to laugh in the faces of the citizens that historical character belongs to and accuse them of racism, is truly galling.

Its a slap in the face for a whole country. They literally gaslighted a whole country and still had the audacity to act like they are the victim.

Congratulations to the people of Egypt for not accepting such a disrespect to their culture. No entity should be able to rewrite the history of a country

Huh, my grandma told me "I don't care what they told you in school, Cleopatra was Irish."

Pull the race card when logic and history is against you? Sounds about right.

She calls Netflix “entire streaming service” like it’s bigger than Egypt 😂😂😂

Following this logic, a "Documentary" casting a Chinese actor as Martin Luther King is fair game.

Cleopatra was Greek according to history. When Alexander the Great's generals divided up the areas Alexander had conquered, Ptolemy got the land of Egypt and surrounding areas. Cleopatra was Macedonian Greek ethnicity and, therefore, not black skinned. But, I forgot, certain people don't read history...🙄

An ancient Roman would look at this and probably ask "Uh, why does Cleopatra look Nubian, and why do the Romans look German?"

it's cute that she thinks its about her or her skin tone & not realizing its about destroying HISTORY

We're not racist. We're just tired of Hollywood blackwashing every movie and rewriting history. It create more racism in the end.

The actress might be the worst of all. To be faced with undeniable evidence and the anger of an entire country and have it only strengthen your belief is something so wildly irrational it's unbelievable.

-I remember my grandmother saying to me Cleopatra was black. -Oh really, how old was your grandmother, two thousand years?

They really had someone's grandma say "trust me bro"

“The level of threat you must feel” meanwhile everyone has to be black and gay in media and video games today

How smooth-brained would you have to be to put yourself in a situation where you might lose billions of dollars because you slandered someone who'd been dead for 2000 years

She's calling the entire country of Egypt racist 💀 Sweetie, cancel culture doesn't work against countries

The actress, clearly, has the intelligence range of a teaspoon.

My Granny told me, so it must be true. Therefore, we can change an entire ancient civilisation's culture.

Casting a black actress for Cleopatra is the equivalent of me casting a black or Chinese guy to play George Washington. It just isn’t historically accurate and distorts perspective on history.

Cast Tom Cruise as Martin Luther King. Then when people complain, label them a racist.

the whole world: was Cleaopatra Egyptian or Greek? Netflix: yes she was Black. we have no proof other than a grandma saying that. yes.

Meanwhile here in Greece we do nothing about it, well done Greeks well done. Special thanks to the Egyptians.

I don't understand companies. Who the fuck is holding a gun to their head? Why do they keep doing this shit? Netflix blink twice for help like wtf.

You can paint Cleopatra blue for all anybody cares but don't call it a documentary unless you have some hard facts to back it up!

Isn't this a type of cultural appropriation? Claiming an entire culture and group as your own and then shamelessly flaunting it in a movie is pretty wild.

The fact she tried to play the race card is irony of the highest order.

Hmmm... Can you imagine the big stink that would have occurred if the Black Panther film producers had chosen to use an actor of Egyptian heritage to play the lead? To add some diversity to the film, of course.

She misconstrued the lawsuit as a personal attack or racial discrimination while in fact it is a battle for historical truth.

She has some nerve accusing Egypt of racism when she literally appropriated Egypt's culture and history.

Once upon a time the major cultures were Egypt and China. Now, thousands of years later Egypt feels insulted to have one of the major players in their history misrepresented by a woman with breathtaking entitlement issues. ...and she considers their entire culture, racist for being insulted because she insulted them. Perhaps Netflix will see the wisdom of vetting their showrunners in the future. Who knows, maybe Disney and Paramount will be able to learn vicariously through the consequences of their failure. Not going to hold my breath though. 😂

Their doing the same with the Indigenous Native Indians Saying they were Originally Black"

The fact that the lead actress laughed at the ENTIRE country for being offended about their history being portrayed incorrectly and called them all racist is INSANE! I would bet she's the type of person who cries and screams when people get HER OWN culture and history wrong and that people should listen and portray it correctly because it's THEIR history but in the same breath say everyone else is racist about a them pushing a THEORY about a historical figure that can be proven wrong with artifacts from that time🙄

The entitlement, arrogance and ignorance is so staggering that it requires a whole country to get up and take legal action. The real Egyptians are taking a stand and protecting their history and culture. I’m glad they’re sticking up for historical facts and their heritage.

Cleopatra was Greek, not Egyptian or African

When the audience score and reviewers score on rotten tomatoes come together to roast you, you know you’ve done fucked up

Next Netflix documentary series: "ADOLF HITLER" Featuring - Will Smith as Adolf Hitler

She is so arrogant. This is real life history. If you falsely portray history you will get backlash

Netflix: Hey users,we made a new “documentary” of the late queen of England,but….instead of white,she’s black…

I can't wait for Netflix to cast a completely different race to play a famous figure from my culture and tell me I'm wrong

And I remember actual Egyptologists saying; "We don't care what Shelley Haley tells you on Netflix. Cleopatra was ethnic Macedonian Greek."

NEVER THOUGHT THAT A WHOLE COUNTRY WOULD SUE an American company like that… and they soooo deserve it!! It puts a big smile on my face 😄

this is so laughable, that actress is as smart as a vending machine.

Yeah, I want to see Whoopi Goldberg cast as Golda Meir, and Denzel Washington play Mao Zedong ! How about having Chow Yun-fat play Paul Robeson, or David Hasselhoff play Miles Davis ? Even better would be casting Jada Pinkett Smith as Marilyn Monroe, and Chris Rock as Menachem Mendel Schneerson in a "documentary" about the Chabad-Lubavitch movement !!!! Get on it Netflix, what are y'all waiting for ????????

they got sued and lost 2 billion to Egypt... for a 3% audience score . the only people that watched that disaster was their INTENDED AUDIENCE and their score was 3%🤣🤣🤣

I think the man who filed the lawsuit should file another lawsuit against the actress for defamation. Let her defend her claims that his lawsuit is rooted in racism in a court of law.

Cleopatra was black. Source: Grandma 😭

There doesn’t seem to be any update on the lawsuit on Google. Is it dropped? Will there a trial? In which jurisdiction? 🤷

They should also consider suing the Actress for stating that Egypt is only doing this because they are RACIST

Cleopatra was of Greek descent and wasn't the most beautiful woman in the world. She was, however, very educated, knew how to speak the language of the people she ruled over, and very charismatic and charming.

Wait... Netflix and the historians who worked on this episode thought Cleopatra was Egyptian?! 😂😂😂😂

Apocalypto is exactly how you make an ACCURATE period film, while respecting it's indingenous culture and history.

It’s wild to me that the actor thinks she’s that important that she takes the lawsuit as a personal attack on herself and her skin tone. The amount of delusion and audacity and quite frankly the stupidity it takes to feel like that, is mind blowing to me. The narcissism in society is completely out of control.

So let me get this straight: they made a documentary radically (and against basic historical fact) claiming that Cleopatra was black because Egypt is an African country. _But,_ when Egypt itself calls out this claim, they’re racist towards black people? 😂 Edit: I know not all Africans are black. That’s kind of the point I was making.

The new Assassins Creed looking even more like a horrible disaster after this info.

Lets hear about the new movie: "1776" Dave Chappelle as George Washington.

It's funny that Egyptians have been saying that she was Greek for close to 3000 years

I sincerely hope the actress gets named in the lawsuit as well for her baseless comments about racism. You shouldnt get to claim racism without basis.

What amused me was the size of that crown she put on - did all egyptian leaders have afros?

Netflix and the people who made the documentary including actress, narrators and "historians" in the series should have to pay.

I don't remember in my lifetime that there was a "documentary " which was so bad, that they got sued by the country it's history it was about.

You know it's mental when a whole country decides to sue netflix

When you play the victim for so long, you fail to recognize you've become the villain.

just because egypt is in africa dosent mean all africans look the same with afro hair. last time i checked africa is a continent with many different races and cultures. this whole idea that they and look like a what we would call a american black person is silly to me.

I love how Netflix literally grabbed a random old lady to say she was black as a way to convince the public. That is truly the most half assed propaganda I have ever seen.

as an asian I humbly accept my role for Nelson Mandela just basically what Egypt feel

I don't normally comment on stuff like this because most of the people involved in the debate aren't really interested in history as much as they are grinding social axes on Twitter, so real historical facts are generally not respected and either embraced or dismissed based on whether they fall in line with the peron's pre-existing prejudices. But I'm going to bite because I've studied Egypt and most of the 'debate' surrounding it is silly. First of all, Ancient Egypt was a very African Civilization - if you lined up a bunch of Ancient Egyptians with modern day Ethiopian people you probably couldn't tell the difference. We know this because we have thousands of drawings the Egyptians did of themselves, more than any other society on earth the Egyptians loved painting themselves in great detail. In fact, the actress who played Cleopatra is probably not too far off from how antique Egyptians looked, especially the royalty, considering upper (Southern) Egypt was historically dominant politically over the north. If she'd been cast as Nefertiti or some other antique Egyptian figure then I can't see any objection, other than her being a bit too fair skinned. The problem is that this all has nothing to do with Cleopatra. Why? Because Cleopatra was Greek. Her family was from Macedonia. The Ptolemic Dynasty that ruled Egypt since the conquest of Alexander never intermarried with the indigenous Egyptian people, and they ruled Egypt like a gigantic plantation with the native people as little better than slaves. All positions of economic, military, and political power were filled by people of the tiny Greek immigrant population. It was South African Apartheid but multiplied by a thousand. This exploitation continued under the Romans until the Isamic invasions of the 7th century. The Greeks and Romans were and are viewed by Egyptians as foreign tyrants and oppressors who exploited their country for millennia. One reason Egyptians adopted Islam so quickly and thoroughly was that it freed them from this exploitation. For Americans, this would be like another country doing a 'documentary' on the Civil War and casting black people to play General Lee and Jeff Davis or doing a remake of Glory with the Freedmen soldiers being played by Swedes. There is a difference between having variety in who you cast and doing something that consciously destroys critical context to the story.

Does anyone know what actually happened to this lawsuit?

Instead of blackwashing Cleopatra why dont they make a show about an actual black Pharaoh called Piye

"My Acting is Terrible, My Knowledge of History is Wrong, I'm Being sued for spreading Misinformation... they must hate me be because of the color of my skin..." I Love how it's always about Skin Color but never about The Actual Situation.

I loved the netflix show but I also understand why they are angry. Comming from a country like Eygypt, Greece or China (which are the most ancient countries of the world) I understand why people get irritated when you try to change our history and culture.

What do you expect from producer Jada Pinkett Smith? She can't even say that adultery is adultery; she calls it “entanglement”. Pathetic!

That older lady saying that her grandmother believed cleopatra was black and not a product of greek incest is crazy af. Schools can say whatever they want but you gotta read the actual sources from antiquity to learn who she was, it’s not hard to find out.

George Washington was also black, so was Jesus, and Christopher Columbus, Einstein, Alexander the Great, Hitler, Isaac Newton, and Moses. My grandmother told me.

I'm still waiting for Richard Dreyfuss to play Nelson Mandela.

Weird because Netflix had done this *right* (for lack of a better term) before: Marco Polo was 2 seasons with *wildly inaccurate* pseudo-historical bullshit with some elements of "white savior" thrown in, but the writing was otherwise pretty sharp and they didn't claim it was a "documentary"

Did she really just say that racism is a “very modern ideology?” Where did she get her education, from Netflix?

This needs to happen every time. Don't let them race swap historical figures in any documentaries!

Seeking to play as an Egyptian royal while ignoring what the ethnicity wants is not racist but calling an entire race racist because they don't want you to represent their historical leaders...

Greece should also sue Netflix

I hope Netflix loses this lawsuit and is forced to pay the entire $2 billion.

Next time they should make a documentary of Abraham Lincoln played by a black actor. "I don't care what they tell you in American history, Abraham Lincoln was black."

History is history, hopefully you do your homework next time Netflix.

ancient Egyptians shared more genetic information with people living in the Middle East than modern Egyptians do. Likewise, the moderns are more closely related to sub-Saharan Africans than the ancients were.

I love how they preach to us about not caring about skin color but go out of their way to change the skin color of established characters.

Back in the day: Romans (white), Macedonians (like Cleopatra ... from chleos patras, the Pride of the Father, white), Greek (white and olive), Phoenicians (semitic ancestors of Lebanese and Jews, white and olive) ... and of course Egyptians (light olive, same as today) amongst many others. There were indeed black people in Egypt, but mainly in the southern Nile Sahara area and before Cleo and who differ culturally and ethnically from Egyptians. They were called Nubians ... which are today, after a massive mixing with Arabs, mostly Sudanese.

I remember when I was a child, my grandmother used to tell me; “I don’t care what anyone tells you, Malcolm X (ra) was Ukrainian”

"100 percent fundamentally rooted in racism" . I wonder what the actress would say if they made a "documentary" about Rosa Parks and cast Meryl Streep. Would she object? I wonder what she would "fundamentally" root her opinion in?

To that woman's grandmother who claims Cleopatra is black, I want to know what her grandmother would feel like if Jennifer Lawrence were to portray Rosa Parks in a Rosa Parks documentary.

As an american I'd like to sau congratulations to Egypt. Im sick of this shit too.

But what about "CleoBlacktra?"

Raceswapping of famous historical people is one of the most racist thing you can do. For if it didn't matters why shange the race.

As a non-Egyptian man, I find this be a great win for Egypt.

Since we’re talking about it, who’s going to sue Assassins Creed for having a Black Man in Japan?

No, of course that old ladies grandma knows better than all the historians and archeologists of the world. We could just stop having education, send out grannies to teach classes in how things "really were" based on stories they heard as children.

Its a disgrace that, unlike Egypt🇪🇬, the government of Greece🇬🇷 does absolutely nothing against that insulting sh*t