Celebrity Watch: Rihanna Opens Up About Her 'Battleship' Role

'I didn't know what I was doing,' she says of first foray into acting.
By Jocelyn Vena

Rihanna on the set of "Battleship"
Photo: Splash News

Rihanna certainly knows a thing or two about military couture; anyone who has seen her "Hard" video knows that. But in "Battleship," her fatigues are anything but high-end. In a chat with UGO.com, the singer opens up about her butt-kicking role as Raikes, saying that her character knows nothing about the glamorous things in life, only the dangerous things.

"It's really cool, it's easy. You don't have to think about what you want to put on, or how cute you look," she says of wearing the uniform in the Peter Berg-directed action flick. "She doesn't like boys. She doesn't like girls either. She's just about her weapons and her work."

Rihanna has always had a tough-girl persona, so when it came time to make her film debut, she knew that this girl was the right one to play. And she made sure she did her research. "We worked with real military people, you know, people in the Navy, people who have fought in Iraq before. They pretty much came and drilled me. This one man, Donald, he pretty much drilled me, yelled at me, cursed me, 'Ow!' Made me do pushups. Everything," she recalled. "Like, my best friend was there the second time we worked together, and I said to her, 'OK, I'm about to do acting class, but you're going to want to kill this man, so just stay in the bedroom. Don't listen to anything he's saying to me right now, just don't kill him, Melissa, just stay in the bedroom.'

"And I remember she just kept walking around, and she would just glance at me, 'Are you OK? Did he just say 'f--- you' to you?' But I mean, it really got you in the mentality, that's the things they really go through, you know, when they first sign up," she continued. "It's not a walk in the park."

Her first encounter with Berg was equally jarring — Rihanna describes the sequence of events as "weird." "And [Peter Berg] just walked out and said, 'Hi, come in,' and I'm like, 'Where is Christa, my manager? Where is my manager?' She wasn't there, and I walked in and all I saw were these little alien mock-ups, these little dolls. And he just started saying, 'Yeah, these are the thugs, he's a thug,' " she said of the meeting. "I laughed and then I realized that he wasn't laughing, and I was like, 'This is weird. Why are there pictures of aliens all over this room?'

"And it was just crazy because he was just really super enthusiastic about it, and he was so sure that I could pull it off and I didn't even know that he was the director of the film, I didn't know anything," she added. "I didn't know what I was doing, where I was going, why."

Check out everything we've got on "Battleship."

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