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Extraterrestrial Star Rihanna Loves Playing Aliens in Movies

"Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets" is the latest film featuring RiRi as a majestic being from outer space.
Photo courtesy of STX Entertainment

Though Rihanna is a venerable juggernaut of the music industry and a beloved fashion icon, her acting roles have been few and far between. Sticking mostly to cameos and tertiary characters, the "bad gal" has dipped her toes into feature films and animation, had a 2-episode stint on A&E's Bates Motel, and landed an upcoming role in 2018's all-women Ocean's Eleven reboot, Ocean's Eight. While her music embodies power, sensuality, and dominance, Rihanna's movie taste seems arbitrary and erratic. However, her cinematic roles have one salient through line: aliens.

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Luc Besson's latest film, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, opened last week to comically negative reviews; Besson's movies usually feel like Star Wars smothered in high fructose corn syrup, and Valerian didn't fall far from the tree. The film is so bad that even fans with a high threshold for sci-fi tawdriness ask: Why did Rihanna get dragged into this? Others say the mononymous icon's bizarre cameo is the only worthwhile scene in the movie.

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Rihanna plays an alien burlesque dancer named Bubble, a seductive shape-shifter who prides herself on her ability to master any role. Valerian, played by Dane DeHaan, encounters Bubble in Paradise Alley, a Reno-like neon heaven, lurid with blinking lights, feathered alien Drag Queens, four-on-the-floor space-EDM, and a strip club run by Jolly The Pimp, AKA Ethan Hawke as a gay space cowboy.

She dances and shape-shifts for Valerian, hitting on all the classics: a French Maid pretzel-legging a pole, a sexy nurse who bends like a Nerds Rope, and a cat-like woman undulating to trap music. Bubble's exit is as wild as her entrance: she dies an inflated, dramatic death in Valerian's arms—like an Old Hollywood Star—and with her last gasping breath probes him to compliment her performance. If any of this sounds ridiculous, you probably haven't seen Besson's other movies, like his sci-fi thriller Lucy, a 90-minute fear-mongering propaganda film about The Cloud, or his cult classic The Fifth Element, in which Milla Jovovich plays The Supreme Being, an all-powerful force who, for some reason, always needs to be saved by human men.

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Rihanna's other roles are in films that fit into the same category of alien movies that leave you slack-jawed. In Battleship (2012), her first major acting role and unfortunately her most prominent, she plays an American Navy gunslinger fighting a terrestrial war against robot-aliens. The movie looks like found footage from Michael Bay's first student film. Her character, Cora Raikes, is a glorified quip generator, spewing one-liners like "Boom," "Get up princess," and the jeer to end all jeers: "Mahalo, motherfucker."

In 2013, the singer cameos as herself in Seth Rogen's 2013 disaster comedy This Is The End. She gets sucked into a fiery sinkhole, to which a distraught pedestrian wails, "Rihanna!!" Though the plot is biblical, the movie is clad with alien-like demons, attacks from the skies, and electromagnetic probes customary to science fiction. Rihanna also had a cameo in the 2014 remake of Annie, starring in a movie-within-the-movie titled "MoonQuake Lake" as a villainous alien named Moon Goddess.

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She also lent her voice to the character Tip In DreamWorks' 2015 animated feature Home, another movie about a telluric alien invasion. On the press tour for the movie, Rihanna avowed, "I don't know what to believe when it comes to aliens. You never know and anything is possible." Whether she's a Scully or a Mulder, Rihanna's alien repertoire goes on, including a fling with Star Trek. Her melodramatic single "Sledgehammer" was released on the soundtrack to Star Trek Beyond. In a behind-the-scenes featurette, she dons a vintage Star Trek tee and glows, "Star Trek has been a part of my life since I was a little girl," adding, "It wasn't, like, just doing a song for any random film. I love Star Trek."

What supernatural passion project will Rihanna tackle next? The universe is her oyster, but I'd love to see her rove through a leading role a la Amy Adams in Arrival. Here's what I know: In 2015, Rihanna dropped a music video for "Sledgehammer," set in the final frontier. It was there, among twinkling pink skies, swaddled in Martian dirt, and tattooed in out-of-this-world cryptographs, where Rihanna revealed her galactic form. As she twirled through rogue spacecrafts and floating moon rocks, I couldn't help but feel like this is where Rihanna belongs: among the stars.