Rihanna’s rise to fame began with her 2005 dancehall pop, Pon de Replay, a powerful beat that proved to be a definitive precursor to the late 2000s pop and R&B music industry. Since then, her stellar career was a stretch of one successful album after the next until 2016’s Anti was released.
The decade-long career that Rihanna had after her destined discovery by the record producer, Evan Rogers, was catapulted by a string of album deals under Jay-Z and a successful partnership with Roc Nation. Soon after she was crowned as the undeniable star of the American R&B scene, the Barbadian singer’s career began to branch out into Hollywood’s most saturated market – the movies.
Rihanna’s Debut in Hollywood With Battleship Adaptation
Adapted from the classic strategy board game of the same name, the 2012 action flick Battleship starring Taylor Kitsch, Liam Neeson, Alexander Skarsgård, and Rihanna was helmed by Peter Berg. The film flopped immediately and massively at the box office but the story that went into the making of the film was the tried and tested formulaic alien invasion versus military film and as such, possessed the potential for success despite its wonky storytelling. However, no such luck prevailed for the ill-fated execution of a film that was quickly lost to the wind.
However, Battleship happened to mark Rihanna’s debut in the Hollywood acting arena, and in an interview with GQ, director Peter Berg revealed exactly how that came to be:
“The idea to cast Rihanna came from me. then saw her do this stupid little Saturday Night Live skit where she was in a classroom giving a hard time to these boys. She was funny as all hell! I knew in that moment that the girl could act. No question.”
Although there exists no question about her skills in front of the lens, Rihanna’s first step into the inner sanctum of Hollywood did not pan out in the most extravagant of ways as expected. Over the years, however, the singer did go on to appear in an array of other projects, the latest of them being the star-studded Hollywood female A-listers ensemble film Ocean’s 8 in 2018.
Rihanna’s Current Trajectory After 7 Years in Hiatus
With her last album being released in 2016, the indefinite hiatus that the singer stepped into was recently called off with her reappearance into the public scene with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever original song, Lift Me Up. The soft melody of the soul-crushing rendition was drastically different from what the fans are usually used to from the powerhouse vocals of Rihanna and as such was received with disappointment as well as praise for her diverse talent as a musician.
Now, Rihanna is on a roll as the Desperado singer reclaims her position and establishes her status as a global phenomenon with her fiery Super Bowl performance alongside confirming her second pregnancy after the event. The happy state of affairs also comes paired with the fact that in the last 6 years, Rihanna’s beauty line, Fenty Beauty, and lingerie line, Savage x Fenty, has catapulted the singer’s status to a billionaire, making her America’s youngest self-made female billionaire at 34 as of Forbes’ 2022 record.
Source: GQ
