What did the Ancient Egyptians look like?

[Mostrov]

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[Phoenicaea]

^concept of real in statues, in spite of the materialization of teachings and references to tradition, i supposed it does not come before than greek. in monuments, idealistic figure of the king is showed.

[Nazis in Space]

I mean where are these neo-Nazis coming from?

See, when Mommy Nazi and Daddy Nazi heil each other very much...

[Post War America]

Now again, this is only vague recollection on my part but I do recall it having something to do with lice, or some other hygenic issue.



When people use the "let directors cast who the want" line, especially in response to people criticizing whitewashed casting in a work of media, there's usually a silent "why do you stupid esjoos have to politicize everything?" attached to the back end.

Yes casting directors have the right to cast who the please for whatever role the please. That does not mean however, that they can expect to be shielded from criticism of their choices. That is dumb. People criticize casting choices all the bleeding time for often far more ridiculous reasons. Somehow though, there always seems to be a group of self proclaimed enlightened centrists and "classical liberals" who pop up out of the woodwork saying pretty much verbatim "directors should cast who they want" whenever a movie catches heat for casting white actors as nonwhite or coded nonwhite characters.

It's almost as if those people want POC to shut up about their concerns.

Claiming Greek / Macedonian culture as Subsaharan is not a concern, it is cultural appropriation.
And if POC are criticised for taking a dumb and racist position, the colour of their skin doesn't give them a pass for something that white people would (rightly) be criticised for.

Remember when the Avatar movie was made, and instead of an Asian actor, a white kid was asked to play Ang? Remember how the studio was (rightly) criticised for that decision?
This is the reverse situation: the studio made the right call, the critics are dumb racists.

Thank you for your all important hot take, yes I am fully aware that Cleopatra VII was (mostly) the descendant of inbred Macedonians. In fact on my very first post on this thread I mentioned explicitly as much. Since you cannot be bothered to actually read before jumping in with your spicy hot takes however, I guess I will engage with this.

The conversation between myself and Hardscrab were over the very general statement of "Casting directors should be able to cast who they want", and not necessarily this specific call. The general statement still absolutely holds true. Not only that, but you will rarely see aforementioned "centrists" defending studio decisions to cast nonwhite characters in white or white coded roles, rather the reverse is true they will attack these studios for being "political".

In this case, the casting director made a good call yes, but it does not, by itself invalidate a wider trend.

[Hardscrab]

Claiming Greek / Macedonian culture as Subsaharan is not a concern, it is cultural appropriation.
And if POC are criticised for taking a dumb and racist position, the colour of their skin doesn't give them a pass for something that white people would (rightly) be criticised for.

Remember when the Avatar movie was made, and instead of an Asian actor, a white kid was asked to play Ang? Remember how the studio was (rightly) criticised for that decision?
This is the reverse situation: the studio made the right call, the critics are dumb racists.

Thank you for your all important hot take, yes I am fully aware that Cleopatra VII was (mostly) the descendant of inbred Macedonians. In fact on my very first post on this thread I mentioned explicitly as much. Since you cannot be bothered to actually read before jumping in with your spicy hot takes however, I guess I will engage with this.

The conversation between myself and Hardscrab were over the very general statement of "Casting directors should be able to cast who they want", and not necessarily this specific call. The general statement still absolutely holds true. Not only that, but you will rarely see aforementioned "centrists" defending studio decisions to cast nonwhite characters in white or white coded roles, rather the reverse is true they will attack these studios for being "political".

In this case, the casting director made a good call yes, but it does not, by itself invalidate a wider trend.

Ok, criticize what you want then. I can’t deny a person for complaining about dumb choices movie directors make.

But the one last thing I have is this: Sure, there’s probably a bunch of casting directors out there who just think “who’s my favorite actor/actress who can play this role” instead of trying to understand and adapt to the culture they are actually portraying but in the end don’t you think that turning even these minor lapses in judgement into debates about racism might not actually be fixing the problem but instead fueling a more and more racially divided society?

Now of course I’m not saying that we sweep more serious issues under the rug, I’m not saying that at all. And I’m not even saying that it’s not dumb when sci-fi movies depict almost all of the people as white even though darker skin is a dominant trait.

But would you agree that the goal should be to create a society where a person is not defined by their race?

[Borderlands of Rojava]

Thank you for your all important hot take, yes I am fully aware that Cleopatra VII was (mostly) the descendant of inbred Macedonians. In fact on my very first post on this thread I mentioned explicitly as much. Since you cannot be bothered to actually read before jumping in with your spicy hot takes however, I guess I will engage with this.

The conversation between myself and Hardscrab were over the very general statement of "Casting directors should be able to cast who they want", and not necessarily this specific call. The general statement still absolutely holds true. Not only that, but you will rarely see aforementioned "centrists" defending studio decisions to cast nonwhite characters in white or white coded roles, rather the reverse is true they will attack these studios for being "political".

In this case, the casting director made a good call yes, but it does not, by itself invalidate a wider trend.

Ok, criticize what you want then. I can’t deny a person for complaining about dumb choices movie directors make.

But the one last thing I have is this: Sure, there’s probably a bunch of casting directors out there who just think “who’s my favorite actor/actress who can play this role” instead of trying to understand and adapt to the culture they are actually portraying but in the end don’t you think that turning even these minor lapses in judgement into debates about racism might not actually be fixing the problem but instead fueling a more and more racially divided society?

Now of course I’m not saying that we sweep more serious issues under the rug, I’m not saying that at all. And I’m not even saying that it’s not dumb when sci-fi movies depict almost all of the people as white even though darker skin is a dominant trait.

But would you agree that the goal should be to create a society where a person is not defined by their race?

Movies should try to be representative although exceptions can be made. In Scarface, most of the actors were Latino but Al Pacino is Sicilian, and that's honestly fine cause he looks Cuban and the culture he's from is pretty close.

[Neanderthaland]

Generally a character's appearance should not spoil your immersion. If an actor seems distractingly out of place in a given setting, that's probably a poor casting call. Obviously that doesn't seem to be the case here.

Netflix recently released a series called Cursed, which is pretty hard to take seriously for a lot of reasons, and the casting decisions probably wouldn't have salvaged it if they had been made better. But as an example: it's a bit odd to have so many people of African heritage hanging around ambiguously-dark-age Briton, and not have it ever be addressed or commented upon. It's not a big deal, but it's not helping matters. This is also mildly irritating, because you get the impression that the producers were patting themselves on the back for being subversive. "See: We made King Arthur Black!" (besides, they're never going to outdo the Fate series on that front anyway.)

Again, it's not the biggest deal. And most of us are willing to suspend some disbelief for the sake of practical considerations. I don't demand that my medieval films only hire actors under 5'5", grind down their teeth, and riddle them with smallpox scars. But maybe don't cast John Wayne as Genghis Khan.

[Tarturous]

They were Nordic

Proof? Or is this just some ridiculous pseudoscience? Mind you, we have an Expert in this thread.

An """Expert"""

[Jedi Council]

This kind of thing is just silly.

Cleopatra died over two millenia ago, are we ever going to conclusively prove what her exact skin tone was? No, not really. Placing modern conceptions of race upon a people so far removed from our own time is pretty pointless.

However, if I had to make a guess?

As far as I am aware, the best representations we have of Ancient Egyptians come from the people themselves; artwork from the time shows them with tanned, or coppery, skin, while often also depicting Nubians and others with much darker skin.

As for Cleopatra herself, Seeing as though she was descended from Macedonian greeks with a penchant for inbreeding, I she probably looked vaguely Mediterranean.

But most modern scholar would probably point out that Egypt was a region of diversity; its very probable that many different peoples, or races as we might consider them today, populated the region at the time.