Rihanna Joins ‘Bates Motel’ As Marion Crane

If you had told someone in 2008 that the singer of “Just Dance” was going to be a Golden Globe winner, they would’ve said you were crazy. But lo and behold, eight years later and Lady Gaga does indeed have a trophy on her shelf for “American Horror Story” (plus a couple of Emmy nominations to boot). Could Rihanna follow in her footsteps?

She’ll give it a whirl, with the singer/actress announcing at San Diego Comic Con that she’ll be joining A&E’s hit series “Bates Motel.” Even more than that, she’s tackling the role of Marion Crane in the what will be the show’s fifth and final season. That’s one helluva way to go.

READ MORE: Everything Changes For Elijah Woods In First Trailer For ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’ TV Series

Of course, you should know that in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” Janet Leigh played Marion who met her unfortunate end in the shower of the Bates Motel. However, don’t expect a carbon copy of the movie.

“Season five is about the ways in which our show does and more specifically does not intersect with the events of Psycho,” showrunner Carlton Cuse told THR. “We are going to see a version of Norman that is much closer now to the one in the movie, but the way in which he acts and the events in the story will not be the same as the movie. They will cross paths with some of the events in the movie and lead to an ultimate resolution. What that resolution is and how that plays out is something that will be not disconnected to the movie Psycho but will be very much our own story in the same way the entire series has been.”

For Rihanna, this will mark her first TV role, following a string of film parts in pictures like “Battleship,” “This Is The End,” “Annie,” and in Luc Besson’s upcoming “Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets.” But this might arguably be her most important role yet, glancing against a cinematic classic. How it works out we’ll have to wait and see when “Bates Motel” returns in 2017.