First look at Rihanna in Bates Motel Final Season

February 2nd 2017, 8:21am

Last Updated on July 21, 2021

The fifth and final season of BATES MOTEL will (finally) see the inclusion of Marion Crane! For those who might not know, Marion Crane was the famously dispatched blonde in the shower and was played by Janet Leigh (Jamie Lee Cutris' mother) in the orinal Alfred Hitchcock terror classic. This time around, she will be played by singer Rihanna in a multi-episode appearance.

But this coming season we will meet "a very different, fleshed-out version of Marion". BATES MOTEL executive producer Kerry Ehrin tells EW:

“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. 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.”

The new season picks up about 18 months after the ending of last season, and here is how Ehrin says the new dynamic will play out:

“Norman is in an incredibly intense and interesting place that we’ve built him to when that sequence of episodes starts. It’s this collision of Bates Motel storytelling and then Marion Crane showing up into that. 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.”

I'm excited to see how this all plays out because I do not believe the TV series' Marion will be meeting the same fate as the classic film's. I would actually wager that it will be Norman who ends up in the swamp. But we will see when Bates Motel returns Feb. 20.

Check out the first looks below: