WONDER WOMAN 1984 Star Gal Gadot Reteaming With Patty Jenkins For CLEOPATRA Movie

@JustAChillFan - I think the bigger deal is she's Israeli than being white. They should have cast a darker skinned woman for the role from not such a controversial country just for the sake of business. They must have known this would be the reaction. Like any Arabic or Asian (Indian) woman or you know Greek would have done.

I get that its acting, so its sad we've come to a point where people can't, you know act. But it is true Israel is a more than a little controversial in it's human rights record and if there is an excuse to give Arabic, Egyptian or Greek actresses a big role, since so few are afforded to them, why not just do it.

I think Gal should just stand down and take a smaller but crucial part in the film. Like her in the main role will get it ban in Egypt which is terrible PR and it will be ban in many other midddle eastern countries and I fear it will take away from Gal's promising career, whether fair or not.

@JustAChillFan - I maintain a "the best actor for the job" attitude, heritage doesn't matter in my eyes. A performer should know how to properly and adequately portray a character.
If we started casting only actors from the exact province a character hailed from we'd limit the pool of talent and give the parts to lesser actors.

I do consider her a pretty bad actress though so I'm totally for her stepping down in place of someone with more talent.

@aresww3 - Gal Gadot is from the region and looks like other women from that region. Since Cleopatra, herself, is not ethnically Egyptian (just another in a long line of invaders), and looked similar to people of the Levant, I think Gadot is fine for the role.

@solskulldeath - I think it's fair to say you are pretty much wrong.

Ancient Canaan lay between the two major powers of the Bronze Age, Egypt and Babylonia. Canaan was (to quote Age of Ultron) "nowhere special, but on the way to everywhere special." Like other nations in the area, they were dominated by Egyptians for a while, then dominated by Babylonians for a while. And between those two dominations, there was a relatively brief period of Israelite independence as its own kingdom then a second independent kingdom before it was conquered by the Greeks. All of this happened a fair number of centuries before Cleopatra's time (keeping in mind that Cleopatra was also herself Greek, as the Greeks had conquered Egypt, too).

While it's reasonable to assume Ancient Egypt had some slaves from Canaan that would be effectively Israelites or Judeans (and those are sort of two different things), I don't think there's any evidence that Egyptians had any particular animus toward Israelites or treated them particularly harshly (at least not compared to any of their other vassal states).

The animus we do know of seems to be the other way. Canaanite/Proto-Israelite cultural grudges against the Egyptians probably motivate the negative attitudes we see in the tradition. In a sense, all of the Proto-Israelites were "slaves" to Egypt when they were conquered, so when they achieved independence, Egyptians remained the cultural villains (to some degree).

More relevant to Cleopatra, you should be looking at something like Maccabean Revolt (where Judeans briefly repulsed the Greek Seleucids to establish another independent dynasty before falling in with the Romans). My understanding is that the Ptolemaic Greeks who controlled Egypt (like Cleopatra's immediate forebears) were happy to see the Judeans causing the Seleucids trouble.

TL:DR - History's actually a hell of a lot more complicated than "X hates Y".

@solskulldeath - you bring up the freaking bible as a historical fact? xD