Back in November, we knew that Rihanna was rumored to have a role in the Adam Driver-starring (and, then-Rooney Mara-starring) movie by Pola X/Holy Motors director Léos Carax, which happens to be a musical with songs written by Sparks. The Rihanna rumor was particularly tantalizing, given the memorable pop-star-musical scene in Holy Motors, feat. Kylie Minogue, as well as Rihanna’s increasingly intriguing film projects (the upcoming Ocean’s Eight and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.)
Mara has since dropped out of the project — seemingly because she’s starring in another musical, scored by Mica Levi and tracing 15 years of a pop star’s life; Rihanna, on the other hand, has been confirmed. Amazon, meanwhile, has been confirmed as the distributor for what’s likely, given Carax’s track record, to be a very unconventional film. The film, titled Annette, follow’s Driver’s character, a comedian whose wife recently died, leaving him with their two-year-old daughter who, per a description in Deadline, “has a surprising gift.” (Perhaps for music? Or, more likely, something unsettling?) This is the tastefully evil company’s latest highly hyped foreign film acquirement, following Luca Guadagnino’s Tilda Swinton-starring remake of Suspiria.
The centrality of Rihanna’s role seems to be unclear: Variety writes that she “stars” in the film alongside Driver, while the Deadline description says she’s “rumored to have a small part.” Filming for Annette — Carax’s first fully English-language film — begins in various locations around the world this spring.