Angelina Jolie News: Actress Dissuaded from Accepting Cleopatra Role to Prevent Whitewashing Trend in Hollywood
Angelina Jolie is being dissuaded from portraying the titular role of Sony Film's version of Cleopatra to show her support against the so-called whitewashing in Hollywood.
Following the reports claiming that "Blade Runner 2049 "director Denis Villeneuve is in talks to direct Sony's version of "Cleopatra," which will be based on Stacy Schiff best-selling book, "Cleopatra: A Life," Yahoo Movies ran an article calling on Jolie not to accept the role and follow British actor Ed Skrein's sacrifice to avoid whitewashing in Hollywood.
To recall, Skrein was lauded by some of his colleagues and industry observers when he turned down a role in the reboot of "Hellboy" after discovering that his role, Ben Daimio, is actually a Japanese-American in the comic book origin of the story. Daniel Dae Kim, who replaced Skrein for the role, applauded the British actor for leaving Asian roles to Asian or American-Asian actors.
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While Cleopatra's ethnicity is still being debated by scholars, it is believed that she is a combination of Greek and Persian heritage as she belonged to the Ptolemaic dynasty, a Greek Macedonian family that ruled Ancient Egypt for 275 years, and because of the common intermingling of Egyptian and Persian aristocracy at the time.
Yahoo Movies suggests that, regardless of the real ancestry of Cleopatra, Jolie is not qualified for the role as, apart from being born in America, she is primarily a French Canadian, Slovak, and German by heritage.
As Jolie has adopted children from various ethnicity, including Madox from Cambodia, Zahara from Ethiopia, and Pax from Vietnam, the online entertainment news outlet opines that the actress has all the reasons to walk away from the planned "Cleopatra" project so that she can prevent the whitewashing trend in Hollywood and help her adopted children see the right actors representing their ethnicity and telling their stories in the future.
As of this writing, it remains unclear if Jolie is, indeed, playing Cleopatra although her name has been attached to the project for years already.
