Although he recently got some bad news regarding one of his previous space-action films, Luc Besson is moving forward with his adaptation of the French graphic novel series, Valérian. The director has already found his heroic spatio-temporal agents, Valérian and Laureline, in Dane DeHaan (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) and Cara Delevingne (Paper Towns). The Knick’s Clive Owen has signed on to play Commander Arün Filitt, who will presumably order the central duo to uphold the time-travel Prime Directive or whatever. And now Besson has announced that Rihanna will do some ass-kicking (probably) in Valérian And The City Of The City Of A Thousand Planets.
The director gleefully shared the news online, describing the singer’s role as a big one. He didn’t provide any specifics on her character, but since he’s reportedly only casting five human roles, we’re going to guess that she’s not playing an extraterrestrial. (That term would probably be retired by the 28th century anyway, what with the thousand planets and all). Rihanna’s last film appearance was in the box-to-screen adaptation of Battleship, in which she made a prescient remark about an unholy Donald Trump/Mike Tyson union. Maybe in her upcoming role, she’ll toss off a line about gender equality in the future/present day, so we can do away with this thing already.
[h/t Variety]