On this week's Bates Motel, Rihanna begins her two-episode Pyscho-inspired arc as Marion Crane, the doomed character Janet Leigh portrayed in the classic 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film. Bates Motel creators/executive producers Carlton Cuse and Kerry Ehrin spoke to me a bit about the casting the pop star as one of cinema's most famous murder victims, how it came about, and why the Psycho storyline wasn't made to be the very end for the series, which will continue for four final episodes beyond Marion's appearance.
"Bates Motel is really the story of Norman and being in Norman's shoes," Ehrin explained, "and what Psycho was doesn't feel like the ending to who Norman is here. Because basically the ending of Psycho is that he's lost. He's gone. He doesn't know who he is. He's completely absorbed and becomes the mother persona. We wanted to tell a different story."
She added, "When we spoke to Rihanna about the Marion role, we told her the intentions of what we wanted to accomplish with the character and the storytelling and that it was going to be something different from the original movie."
As it turned out, Rihanna would up being offered the part because she was a superfan. "I was reading a profile of her in Vanity Fair," Cuse said, "and I was just reading along and she said that Bates Motel was her favorite TV show and I was like 'What?' So I called Kerry up and we had been talking a lot about the whole issue of how we were going to handle Marion Crane and who we could cast and stuff like that. So I asked 'Well, what about Rihanna for Marian Crane?' And Kerry loved the idea and so I made a few phone calls thinking that this was absolutely never going to happen. But she actually was a huge fan of the show and she put aside her concert tour temporarily to come and shoot with us. It was just an amazing set of circumstances and we sort of fell into the solution to our problems and it was one we never imagined we would find."
Beginning with the episode "Dreams Die First," directed by cast member Nestor Carbonell, Psycho will collide with Bates Motel in fascinating ways. But how did Cuse and Ehrin handle this task knowing that there might be high fan anticipation?
"I think you can go crazy if you tried to imagine fan exceptions," Cuse remarked. "I think the only way you can make a show is to trust your own gut instinct. Kerry and I spent a lot of time sitting around and just talking about the show and trying to find a way where the storytelling felt right in both of of our guts and that was the barometer we used to make decisions. I guess the hope is always that if she liked it and I liked it then the audience would also like it. That's how we operate. So we thought this Rihanna idea was cool and we'll take a shot at it and hopefully the audience will share our enthusiasm."
"Also, it's impossible to gauge fan expectations because they all have different expectations," Ehrin added. "If you go on Twitter and look around then it would be impossible to gauge anything based on fan expectations. You'd wind up with oatmeal."
Bates Motel kicks off the Marion Crane storyline with the episode "Dreams Die First," airing Monday, March 20th on A&E.
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association (TCA). Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at http://ift.tt/2aJ67FB.
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