Fantasy collided with reality last month, when the Black British actor Adjoa Andoh, who plays Bridgerton’s Lady Danbury, was invited by ITV to commentate on King Charles’s coronation. Andoh described the lineup of waving royals on the Buckingham Palace balcony as “terribly white”. With the family’s solitary person of colour – the Duchess of Sussex – conspicuous by her absence, Andoh was technically correct. Even so, the comment prompted the highest number of complaints to Ofcom of any broadcast this year.
Perhaps Andoh had lost sight of the yawning gap between fiction and fact. Shows such as Netflix’s Bridgerton have been applauded for introducing actors of colour into the “terribly white” space of costume drama, but some people remain resistant to anything that upsets their ideas of the past (even if those ideas were largely gleaned from costume dramas).
We’ll come back to Bridgerton. In the meantime, another new show has had people up in arms: Queen Cleopatra, a Netflix docuseries co-produced and narrated by Jada Pinkett Smith. Its sin was to cast a Black actor as the Egyptian ruler: Britain’s Adele James, who is mixed race. Cleopatra has been portrayed many times by white actors, including Vivien Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor and Monica Bellucci, but this supposed “blackwashing” was too much for some – and not just the usual suspects. Egypt’s antiquities minister, Zahi Hawass, complained: “This is completely fake. Cleopatra was Greek, meaning that she was light-skinned, not black.” One Egyptian lawyer even sought legal action to block Netflix in the country for its promotion of “Afrocentric thinking”.