SAN DIEGO >> Television ruled the second day of Comic-Con International with Rihanna making headlines by announcing her casting in the final season of “Bates Motel” as Marion Crane.
The cast and crew of the A&E drama announced Friday at Comic-Con International that the singer-actress will join them to portray the role originated by Janet Leigh in the original film version of “Psycho.”
“I’m about to check into the Bates Motel very soon,” Rihanna said in a video played during the “Bates Motel” panel.
“Bates Motel” executive producers Kerry Ehrin and Carlton Cuse were on hand at the pop-culture convention with cast members to discuss the show’s upcoming fifth and final season.
Cuse said he and Ehrin heard Rihanna was a fan of the psychological series and called her casting the “perfect collision of creativity and fate.”
The series isn’t the only one to add new characters in the upcoming season.
New footage released during “The Walking Dead” Hall H panel Friday at the San Diego Convention Center included comic book character King Ezekiel and his pet tiger Shiva.
The dreadlocked character from the comics will be portrayed in the zombie drama’s upcoming seventh season by actor Khary Payton. In the comics on which the hit AMC series is based, the character rules a formidable community known as the Kingdom.
“We’re going to see leaders with different styles and how they work — some benevolent and some not so benevolent,” teased executive producer Gale Anne Hurd.
The panel kicked off Friday with actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan menacingly stalking behind several cast members with his villainous character Negan’s barbed-wire bat. At the end of last season, Negan infamously assassinated a character off screen. Their fate will be revealed in the season premiere.
“It’s a really (expletive) start to the season, but hang on because we are heading to one of the greatest showdowns of the show,” said “Walking Dead” actor Andrew Lincoln.
Directly after “The Walking Dead” panel, “Game of Thrones” co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss offered a few insights into possible character motivations left unexplained by the show. Sophie Turner, for one, said that her character Sansa might not be entirely thrilled that her half-brother (at least to her knowledge) Jon Snow was declared King of the North.
“I’m not sure she believes Jon is capable of running Winterfell in the north. She thinks he doesn’t have the knowledge, the experience, the intellect that she has. And I concur,” Turner said. “She knows he has wonderful morals ... those Stark morals, (and) that inevitably he’ll make the right decisions, or the good decisions, but whether it’s going to benefit anyone is another story.”
Liam Cunningham, who plays Davos Seaworth, said that George R. R. Martin has said the ending would be “bittersweet,” which really could mean anything for these storytellers, who tend to run toward the twisted.
“I have this image of a white walker sitting on the throne,” Cunningham said. “But what do I know?”
Turner got quite a few boos when she suggested that it should be Littlefinger (Aidan Gillen) on the Throne at the end.
“It’s still ultimately George’s imagination that gave us these characters and gave us this world,” Benioff said, adding that it should be exciting to fans that the books now will be different from the show in some ways and the same in others. “Hopefully we’re still living out the spirit of George’s imagination.”
Benioff and Weiss said the recently announced seven-episode seventh season wouldn’t air until next summer — much later in the season than usual — because the production has to wait for colder climates to begin filming.
As Benioff said: Winter is here.
