‘Bates Motel’ season 5 spoilers: First look at Rihanna as Marion Crane

The fifth and final season of “Bates Motel” will be premiering a tad later this month on A&E, and there are a number of different reasons to be excited about it. Obviously, one of them is that this show is going to present an opportunity to give you a sense of conclusion (at least from the show’s point of view) to the story of Norman Bates. Meanwhile, another is going to be the opportunity to see precisely what the show chooses to do with their interpretation of Marion Crane, the famed character from the Alfred Hitchcock movie.

One sweeping change that we already know is coming with this show is that they’ve cast a notable pop star in Rihanna in the role. We’re not entirely sure that this was a name that was on anyone’s radar, but hey, apparently she’s a fan! That’s a great thing, given that she’ll bring an interesting energy and sense of personality to the show when she turns up. As executive producer Kerry Ehrin tells Entertainment Weekly, you are going to see parts to this version of Crane that are recognizable to the ones that you saw in the “Psycho” movies. However, at the same time there are also going to be some other elements that stand out and are different. For one, she is going to have a whole lot more depth:

“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 … t’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.”

We’ll certainly admit that Rihanna wasn’t the first name that we thought of when picturing who the show’s version of Crane could be, but this could precisely be one of the reasons why it works. It’s a chance for the show to think outside of the box, and we absolutely don’t think that’s a bad thing for them to do and explore.