Rihanna might be the inarguable queen of pop music, street style and side-eyes, but if there’s one part of pop culture she’s yet to master, it’s film and television. Technically, she’s been at it for a while—her first official on-screen appearance was over a decade ago—and yet she’s somehow struggled to snag her rightful place on the pop culture throne. The transition from musician to actress is ages old. Songstresses like Queen Latifah, JLo and (most recently) Janelle Monae have famously managed to build careers in each field, but for some reason, despite her attempts, Rih’s acting career still hasn’t totally stuck. 

Luckily, after years of near misses, Rihanna seems to finally be getting the attention she deserves: she’s got three movies lined up in as many years, with Valerian hitting theaters this Friday, Ocean’s Eight in 2018 and her Twitter-cast buddy comedy with Lupita Nyong’o (presumably) in 2019. What changed to kick off this line of high-profile projects? It seems the industry has finally cracked the code to Rihanna’s screen star persona, by offering her characters that are as colossally confident, alluring and quick to perform as her pop star persona we know so well. This time, Rihanna isn’t being cast in roles in spite of her pop stardom, she’s being cast because of it. And when Rihanna’s on-screen presence works, she’s got the nearly preternatural mark of a movie star—a quality too few and far between in the industry today.

But first, let’s go back to where this started. That aforementioned first on-screen appearance was in Bring it On: All or Nothing, as a side-banged baby Rih spinning “Pon de Replay” for Hayden Panettiere and Solange to dance-battle to. But for purists, Rihanna’s first real movie role was Battleship: an overstuffed, alien-spiked garbage fire of a movie that was woefully undeserving of Rih’s overwhelming star power. In it, she plays a crew member under siege from alien invasion, and is completely wasted as a supporting character—even if she looks unfairly good in military fatigues. She eventually won a Razzie for “Worst Supporting Actress” for her work in the movie, but I call foul: she got (and delivered the hell out of) the best Schwarzenegger-esque zinger in the whole damn movie. That’s gotta count for something, right?

It would be five years until Rihanna got another shot on the big screen, in a movie, perhaps ironically, about the end of the world. This is the End gave Rihanna her proper start, allowing her to play an elevated version of herself opposite a coked up, sexually aggressive Michael Cera. She’s got limited screen time, as she’s swallowed up by a hole in the earth in the first 30 minutes, but not before she knocks the living daylights out of Cera following a particularly brazen ass slap. (Fun fact? Rihanna allegedly only allowed the ass slapping happen as long as she got to hit Michael Cera as hard as she could.) There was Annie’s movie within a movie that featured Rihanna as some kind of mythical water goddess embroiled in a supernatural subplot with Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, and her voice work in the middling Home, Rihanna’s first bonafide starring role, but even that couldn’t help get things off the ground. 

Strangely enough, it was Bates Motel that would turn things around—a long running A&E series based on Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic Psycho. Rihanna was cast as Marion Crane, the iconic scream queen who famously meets her end in a seedy motel shower after being hacked to pieces by Norman Bates. But rather than handing us an epic, semi-nude death scene, Rihanna got on IG live to watch herself to evade death in the most badass way possible. Hopping into the shower after being told her longterm boyfriend Sam Loomis is in fact a cheating married man, Rihanna cuts her plans short with a snarl. “Fuck this,” she groans, before leaving the motel, getting into her car and driving off into the distance with a suitcase of stolen cash. As a bonus? That cheating boyfriend gets her death scene instead. It’s the most Rihanna rewrite of the classic slasher scene as one can imagine: a glamorous woman scorned, barrelling down the freeway with single dollar bills flying out of the windows. 

And then there’s Valerian, the gloriously ridiculous, acid trip of a space opera that features Dane Dehaan and Cara Delevingne awkward-flirting with each other amongst a slew of CG creatures and rainbow brite imagery that is thankfully cut – about 80 minutes in – with the appearance of Rihanna. Her name is Bubble (why not?), a dancer at a seedy looking space brothel who spends her brief screen time oscillating between various sets of suggestively fetishistic get-ups in an attempt to charm. Technically an amorphous alien being, Rihanna’s voice gets more screentime than her actual physical being, but it’s still enough to make her clearly the best part of the film, offering some much needed levity to the crazy crash-smash proceedings. In her last scene, Dehaan looks emotionally in her eyes: “You are the greatest artist the universe has ever known.” Truer words have never been spoken, my friend. 

Rihanna
Image via STX Entertainment

Luc Besson, the director of Valerian, said he hardly considered anyone else for the role of Bubble. “When I have Bubble in my head, my first image was Rihanna,” Besson told Complex. “And I don’t know why, maybe because, Bubble is the ultimate artist and it’s probably the vision I have from her.” Of course, Bubble works because she’s basically Rihanna: a next-level entertainer with a penchant for the dramatic. “She’s in this place, she has to perform, and the thing that makes her feel free is her performing,” Rihanna said of her character. “Her being an artist, her becoming whatever, and making people feel happy that way.” 

Rih can relate. She’s spent years killing it in the studio, on stage, and in music videos, ones that, particularly recently have begun to feel like films of their own. Rihanna co-directed a full-scale narrative in "Bitch Better Have My Money" and delivered cinematic visuals in "Sledgehammer" and "Needed Me" which were helmed by well-known voices in film and TV, Floria Sigismondi of Runaways fame and Spring Breakers director Harmony Korine, respectively. The same goes for her Bates Motel character, whose fame precedes her and whose cinematic identity requires her to have something to hide (and thus something to perform). 

The question of whether or not Rihanna can actually act remains still a little murky: it’s maybe telling that so far the multi-hyphenate has performed best in projects that play on her blustery stage presence and self-aware stardom; and it’s unlikely we’ll see Rih amongst a list of nominees come awards season. But the other question—does it matter?—is easy to answer. Rihanna has technically been acting for the majority of her life: being a pop star is a full-time performance gig, and it’s a job that arguable no one else in the industry has managed to tackle so well. When Hollywood casts Rihanna for her stage presence and self-aware stardom, we get the same kind of unquantifiable Rihanna effect on screen. And while she takes a famously private and loyal stance in her personal life, Rih’s presence in movies and television allows her to cash in on a pre-made star persona that’s nothing if not fully formed—one that we rarely see so convincingly played in Hollywood.

On the horizon, Rihanna’s got Ocean’s Eight, easily the most prestigious movie of her career so far, that sees her co-starring with icons like Cate Blanchett and Helena Bonham Carter. If that weren’t enough, it looks as though Rih will be pulling off some kind of grand-scale heist at the Met Gala in it, an event she’s been know to slay irl for years. Add in the fact that she’s staring down a scam artist-turned-black widow role in that upcoming Lupita Nyong’o joint, and it’s not hard to imagine that Rihanna’s film career is officially on the right track. And thank goodness. Why should the music industry get to have all the fun, anyways?