Ask Yourself: What's the Best Acting Role Rihanna's Ever Had?

Today, Variety reports that Rihanna will star in a new music drama Annette, under French director Leos Carax. And in news that will delight millennial basics like me the world over, she will be joined by Girls and Star Wars actor Adam Driver, and hopefully (pray for it) they will do kissing. According to Deadline, Annette follows a widowed standup comedian (probably Driver) and his two-year-old daughter, and Rihanna will have a "small" role.

Interestingly, this is probably the most "serious" project that Rihanna has been involved in (I know, I know, how dare I shade Battleship in this way, I'm sorry), but since she was also confirmed for a part in the new all-woman Ocean's reboot, it appears that Rihanna – fashion designer, musician, humanitarian – has now also got the acting bug. So I ask: what is her best role to date? Let's do a run-down, shall we?

I mean. It's a movie based on a board game. It was never going to be a wild success was it? It's not Rihanna's finest hour, but really Battleship was nobody's finest hour.

Here, Rih dipped her toe into the world of voice acting, and came off pretty well. But because only her voice was involved, her role as Tip unfortunately can't advance any further on my very strictly judged list *judge face*.

This was great because it felt like a Tumblr race-bent casting dream post made flesh. Rihanna gave a pretty great Marion Crane in Bates Motel, taking on the role made iconic in Hitchcock's Psycho by Janet Leigh, but also, this is a character who eventually gets a murder done on her in the shower, and that is a very un-Rihanna thing to do.

This brings me to the inevitable. The split second of Rihanna slapping Michael Cera in the face is in the top 1% of anything that has ever been committed to film.

You can kind of consider this a proxy for all her music videos (but this is the best, largely because of the involvement of both Sanam and Mads Mikkelson, and also because of Rihanna beating people up while wearing a never-ending carousel of looks). Rihanna never gives better Rihanna than when she's Rihanna-ing on her own terms, playing one of the many versions of herself, as we can see from the top two positions in this list. We can only hope that her Annette role will require her to play a wildly famous and beautiful popstar, because then she will win an Oscar.

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(Image via Rihanna on Instagram)