Rihanna Checks-In at ‘Bates Motel’ to Update a Classic ‘Psycho’ Character
Rihanna is preparing to check into Bates Motel as one of the Psycho tale’s most iconic characters, next to Norman Bates himself.
Marion Crane was introduced as the protagonist in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller Psycho, on which the A&E hit series Bates Motel is based. In the film, Marion (played by Janet Leigh) was on the run after stealing her boss’s money for her boyfriend and ended up at Bates Motel as she continued to elude the police. Audiences were drawn into her story and enthralled with the character, only for her to be murdered by Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates in the first act of the film in a twist that will forever be remembered in cinematic history.
Rihanna will play Bates Motel‘s version of Marion Crane, who the show’s executive producer, Kerry Ehrin, says will be a more in-depth look at the character who was killed off so suddenly in the film.
“We’re taking threads of that story and definitely using them so it’s recognizable, it’s just where we go with it is very different,” she tells EW. “It’s tough to be in a situation where you’re in love with a guy, and for whatever reason, he keeps stalling. You still have all this hot sex with him, and he’s saying he loves you, but he’s stalling. The internal story of that, for a woman, is a really interesting one. We never really got to see that. In Psycho, you just see the outside of that more. It was trying to do a story about a contemporary woman with some edge, with some expectations, who isn’t perfect, who isn’t always perfectly sweet, who is in that situation, but we’re rooting for her to get what she wants.”
Ehrin also revealed that the final season of the show will pick up 18 months after Norma Bates’s death and Marion will come along at just the right time for Norman, which sounds like bad news for Riri’s character. “It’s this collision of Bates Motel storytelling and then Marion Crane showing up into that,” Ehrin said. “He’s in a very fragile and lonely place, and Marion Crane is a charismatic woman, she’s super present when she’s with him and she’s very attractive — all those things are exactly what he needs right at this moment.”
Bates Motel returns Monday, Feb. 20 at 10 p.m. ET on A&E.
Photo Credit: A&E Press
