Rihanna is checking into the final season of Bates Motel as Marion Crane. The cast and crew of the A&E drama announced Friday at San Diego Comic-Con International that the singer-actress will join them to portray the role originated by Janet Leigh in the original film version of Psycho. Bates Motel executive producers Kerry Ehrin and Carlton Cuse were on hand at the pop-culture convention with cast members Vera Farmiga, Freddie Highmore, Max Thieriot and Nestor Carbonell on Friday to discuss the show’s upcoming fifth and final season. Cuse said he and Ehrin heard Rihanna was a fan of the psychological series and called her casting the “perfect collision of creativity and fate.” In the film, the character famously meets her bloody demise in the shower of Room
- The modern-day Psycho prequel debuted in 2013 and features Highmore and Farmiga as Norma and Norman Bates operating the motel in the coastal town of White Pine Bay, Ore. Rihanna’s acting credits include the board game adaptation Battleship and the apocalypse comedy This is the End.
The cast of Game of Thrones gathered Friday at the annual Comic-Con in San Diego, with co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, actress Sophie Turner and others among the panelists. The questions were mostly retrospective but still lively — Benioff said Turner made them all take shots of vodka before they came out on stage. Turner, for one, said that her character Sansa might not be entirely thrilled that her assumed half brother Jon Snow was declared King of the North. “I’m not sure she believes Jon is capable of running Winterfell in the north. She thinks he doesn’t have the knowledge, the experience, the intellect that she has,” Turner said. The cast also speculated on who they might like to see on the Iron Throne at the end of the show. Liam Cunningham, who plays Davos Seaworth, said Martin has said his series would have a “bittersweet” ending. “I have this image of a white walker sitting on the throne,” Cunningham said. “But what do I know?”