A&E has released the first teaser and two images of Rihanna as Marion Crane in the final season of “Bates Motel.”
The pop star will inhabit the role originally played by Janet Leigh in the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film “Psycho” when the A&E drama returns for Season 5 next month. She joins Freddie Highmore and Vera Farmiga, who star as Norman Bates and his twisted mother.
Other new faces joining the series this season are Isabelle McNally (“House of Cards”), Austin Nichols (“The Walking Dead,” “Ray Donovan”) and Brooke Smith (“Grey’s Anatomy,” “Ray Donovan”). Additionally, Season 5 will see the return of Caleb Calhoun (Kenny Johnson) and Chick Hogan (Ryan Hurst) who come back with agendas of their own.
“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,” executive producer Kerry Ehrin said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
“It’s tough to be in a situation where you’re in love with a guy, and for whatever reason, he keeps stalling,” she continued. “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.”
“Bates Motel” returns for its fifth and final season on Feb. 20.
