Pop star, movie star, and Harvard University Humanitarian Award winner Rihanna is now one step closer to world domination. The bad gal with no phucks to give made her primetime TV debut in Bates Motel as the iconic Marion Crane — yes, that Marion Crane who was famously stabbed to death in that Psycho shower — and she was hiding a big secret.
In one scene of season 5’s "Dreams Die First," Marion walks out of what seems to be an apartment building, down some stairs, and into a cherry red convertible while trying to calmly escape with a suitcase filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. There’s something distinctly un-RiRi about her movements, which now makes sense. Rihanna was using a body double.
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Executive producers Kerry Ehrin and Carlton Cuse admitted to needing a Rihanna stand-in after the episode aired. "She was unbelievable and so committed," Cuse tells TVLine. "But there were certain shots and a couple of little pieces that we couldn’t physically schedule with her."
That likely means the second part of Rihanna’s two-episode arc will also have her body double, especially the aptly-titled followup episode "Marion" will feature the meat of Ri’s storyline. "We decided that if she was going to be on the show we wanted to give her a real part," Cuse says of Rihanna’s thirty-three pages of lines. "And she showed up and she worked like a dog for a week."
Although we only got a few minutes with Marion in her debut installment, we already know the character is peak Rihanna. Norman Bates’s inevitable victim is introduced as Sam Loomis’s unknowing other woman who is desperate to get married. Yes, that sounds nothing like Rihanna, so she makes up for it by committing crimes and smashing the patriarchy.
Marion is a notary who’s clearly ogled by her boss and a client during a meeting. When she later asks her boss for a promotion or raise for three years of stellar work, he responds by shading her lack of a college degree and shutting her down. That doesn’t really bum Marion out since her preferred form of revenge is stealing a suitcase of cash from the geezers and hightailing it to her boyfriend’s town. Sadly, that means she's now hiding out in the nightmare that is Bates Motel.
It’s all basically the "BBHMM" music video without all the murder… for now.
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