Rihanna (14 page)

I
n July 2010, Rihanna found out about a young actress called Shannon Tavarez, who had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukaemia three months earlier, aged eleven. Shannon had been playing Nala in the Broadway production of
The Lion King
when she started getting pains in her legs. After visiting the doctor, she was diagnosed with leukaemia and the race was on to find her a bone marrow match, because she desperately needed a transplant. Because her dad was Dominican and her mom was African-American, this wasn’t going to be easy.

Rihanna wanted to do something for her, and along with Alicia Keys and 50 Cent, she appealed to her fans for help. She told
People
magazine: ‘[Shannon] should be performing on Broadway, but is confined to her bed, fighting for her life.

‘She needs to find a bone marrow donor to survive. I urge all my fans to register (as donors). It’s the most beautiful thing someone could do, to give the gift of life.’

Sadly a bone marrow match couldn’t be found for Shannon, and she had an umbilical cord blood transplant in August 2010. She died from leukaemia on 1 November 2010, and the lights at the theatre where
The Lion King
was being staged were dimmed. Her mum released a statement, which read: ‘Shannon’s dream was to perform on stage, and that she did.’

When Rihanna heard the news that Shannon had died, she was understandably upset. She tweeted: ‘Just got off of a plane ride and got horrible news that our little star Shannon Tavarez has lost her battle against leukaemia. Way too soon. Keep her family in your prayers.’

R
ihanna hit the road again for the North America and Canada part of her tour, which took place in 26 cities over July and August 2010. She was joined by her support act Ke$ha, and they had fun together, as Ke$ha divulged to MTV: ‘We have slumber parties and pillow fights, and we braid each other's hair a lot.

‘We talk about boys, naked. Touring with Rihanna is incredible, you should come see it. It's really fun. I've been out with her for about two weeks now and I just learn so much from her as a performer. She has one of the best voices of anyone I've ever seen live and I kind of just take it as my opportunity to hype up thousands of people. It's epic. She's amazing live and her voice is just so good. I'm kind of just, like, her hype girl. I take the stage and hype it up for 40 minutes.'

One night of the tour that stands out for Rihanna, her dancers and crew is 25 August. That was the night her dancer Chase Benz decided to propose to his girlfriend. Tessa Reyes had gone to see the concert in Chicago without knowing that her boyfriend would be making her go on stage. Everyone behind the scenes was in on it and they posted up three photos on the background screen before Chase got down on one knee. One photo had Chase as a little kid, another had the young Tessa and the third photo was a recent picture of the two together. After Tessa said ‘yes', the audience cheered and the couple walked off together backstage, where no doubt RiRi congratulated them.

The people close to Rihanna enjoyed other special nights, too. Kanye West saw her performance at New York's Madison Square Garden and was amazed. That night, he himself was performing at a secret show at the Bowery Ballroom, but he couldn't resist popping in to see Rihanna's show first. He felt he had to share how good Rihanna's concert was with his audience, and told them: ‘So I went to Rihanna's concert tonight and when I saw her do “I'm so hard, eh eh eh”, I'm not gonna lie to ya'll, I might have actually started crying, just to see my little sister onstage with her production, her outfit, her song and rocking Madison Square Garden at her own sold-out show. It was a very emotional moment for me and I'm just so proud of her.'

Rihanna was on top form as she performed to sell-out crowds each night, and then Billboard announced that with ‘Love the Way You Lie' at No. 1, she was tying with Beyoncé, Mariah Carey and Lady Gaga for the artist with the most No. 1 singles on the pop airplay chart.

Despite being really busy with her tour, Rihanna continued to go and see Matt play for his baseball team whenever she could. From June onwards his performances hadn't been as good as usual, and he began being placed on the bench. Los Angeles Dodgers fans started to blame Rihanna and said his poor form was down to him spending too much time with her. They thought Matt's girlfriend being in the stands might also affect him on match days.

Matt heard the rumours and decided to set the record straight. He told the
Los Angeles Times
: ‘My girl has nothing
to do with what I do on the baseball field. If anything, she helps. She makes me happy, and as stressed as I am coming home sometimes, it's nice to have someone there who just wants to support you.'

Because Rihanna only has time to visit Barbados a couple of times a year, she enjoys getting to know other Bajans who cross her path. She spent some time in the recording studio with Shontelle in the summer of 2010, having previously worked with her back in 2007 on the
J-Status
track, ‘Roll It'. They had originally met when they were both kids growing up in Barbados. Shontelle was actually Rihanna's drill sergeant for a time, and explains on her official website: ‘There was one occasion when I had to make her drop and give me ten push-ups. We laugh about it now, I think she's forgiven me.'

Shontelle was also signed by Evan Rogers and Carl Sturken, after they heard one of her tracks being played by a Bajan radio station, and soon afterwards, she ended up moving to the US. Because she comes from the same country, and she was signed by the two men who signed Rihanna, many people have suggested that the two performers are enemies but this couldn't be farther from the truth.

During a promotional trip to the UK in August 2010 before her single ‘Impossible' came out, Shontelle explained to Digital Spy: ‘People want to make us enemies so bad and we just laugh about it because we're like, I don't get it. We are two girls from Barbados who are just so excited about the fact that we come from this small
island that so many people didn't even know existed until Rihanna broke out.

‘Now we recently made history, where we had two artists from Barbados in the Top 10 at the same time – and that has never happened ever in history, not even from any country outside the US. So we're so excited that our little island is making such great waves, you know. I mean, we just love it and we've recently been in the studio together and we just keep laughing like, wow, we're rivals but yet we're working together.'

Shontelle actually helped Rihanna pen the track ‘Man Down' for her
Loud
album, alongside Timothy and Theron Thomas and Shama Joseph. In order to squeeze in the time to do this because of Rihanna's hectic schedule, Shontelle went to watch one of her concerts, and the second it was over, Rihanna came and sat in one of the buses and they started to write it. Because Shontelle knew RiRi so well, she found writing the song a lot easier than it would have been writing for someone she didn't know.

Rihanna loved the finished song because it had such a Jamaican vibe.

U
p until August 2010, Rihanna’s Twitter account was controlled by her record label: she decided things had to change and so she took over. Once the switch had been made, she tweeted: ‘So now that i finally took over my Twitter page no more corny label tweets......lol! whaaasssuupppp ppl!!!!!’

Rihanna told BBC Radio 1: ‘I’m still not a big Twitter person but I tweet now and then when I have to or when I want to say what’s up to my fans. I like talking to my fans, but then I don’t want to be overdoing it and tweeting all the time. I hate it when people tweet all the time, every second, it annoys me and I wouldn’t like to be that annoying person. I don’t think anyone is that interested, anyway.’

She wanted to start interacting with her fans properly for
the first time and ask for their advice on things she should and shouldn’t do. When she first started tweeting, RiRi worried a lot about what she should write, and thought about what she would tweet for days, but now she is fine about it and just tweets what she thinks.

Rihanna’s fans love the fact that she can be a bit crazy at times and isn’t afraid to make mistakes. She isn’t scared to tweet things that might annoy her record company, either: she is a rebel at times and wants her fans to express themselves and be happy all the time. RiRi genuinely cares for them and wants them to be comfortable in their own skin. She often uses Twitter to tell them to be true to themselves.

Around the same time as taking control of her own Twitter account, Rihanna started looking on fan forums and joined a live chat on her official fansite RihannaDaily.com. As she joined in the debate, fans accused her of being an imposter; she made one of her friends contact the site to verify it really was her.

Rihanna has always wanted to act in a movie but she’s never been interested in playing a singer. When she found out about a new sci-fi movie based on the board game Battleship, she was interested because the story sounded fascinating, and she wasn’t about to secure a super-glam role. She would need to act!

The movie was to be directed by Peter Berg, who is best known for directing
Hancock, The Rundown
and
The Kingdom. Batman Begins
actor Liam Neeson, Taylor Kitsch (
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
) and actor Alexander Skarsgård
(
Generation Kill
) were signed up, so it was to be a huge movie. It was a big challenge for Rihanna to take on, but she had wanted to be an actress for so long that she was willing to do whatever was needed.

Rihanna started filming her scenes in Hawaii in September 2010. She was to play Raikes, a weapons officer in the United States Navy. Her role is that of a tough girl who joins in the battleship fight against an alien enemy. Rihanna decided to tone down her Bajan accent for the movie: in interviews, she sometimes gets tired of being asked to answer the same questions three times because the interviewer can’t understand what she is saying, so she didn’t want to take any risks. She didn’t want people saying they couldn’t understand her after watching the movie in cinemas.

Entertainment Weekly
asked Rihanna who was the most bad-ass in the movie out of herself, Alexander Skarsgård or Liam Neeson. She replied: ‘Me. Well, the most bad-ass in the whole movie is Taylor Kitsch but I get to kick some ass, too.’

Initially, she had only two weeks of filming to do, and she flew in her friends and family so that they could have a bit of a holiday together before she had to go back to work. While she was there, she tweeted a photo of herself wearing leis (Hawaiian flower necklaces). During the holiday, everyone messed around with tattoo transfers and Rihanna had a huge gun transfer on her thigh. They hit the beach, and she ended up having fun in a canoe with Melissa. After returning home she had a busy few weeks, as
she was promoting ‘Only Girl (In the World)’ and organising Katy Perry’s bachelorette party. RiRi and Katy had grown particularly close over the previous year, and they had become the best of friends, not forgetting Melissa, of course.

Having been a cadet when she was growing up helped RiRi when it came to playing Raikes in
Battleship
, as she was able to impress both cast and crew with her weaponry skills. She talked to
Q Magazine
about what it was like to be part of the Bajan army cadet force: ‘I was very good at drill – I had to be. The people I looked up to were really fit. I wanted to gain their respect. Sonita, my best friend at the time, did it with me. We got separated for talking and then we got good. I wasn’t considering a career. It was a choice between Guides, Scouts and Cadets.

‘I could probably drop and give you 20 easily but I’m not going to do it right now because I am wearing a tight dress, and it’s late and I’m tired. I am pretty good with a rifle, too, and it has come in useful. I’m making a movie at the moment [
Battleship
] and I showed them I could already handle a weapon. They were blown away. Not literally, I’ve never fired a weapon in anger.’

In order to become an actress and not look like a singer trying to act, RiRi got herself an acting coach to work with her and teach her how to use what she has been through in the past to help portray emotions onscreen. She also learned more through watching other actresses in movies. Rihanna’s favourite actresses are
Naomi Watts, Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep. Her favourite male actors of the moment are Jonah Hill and Michael Cera.

The director Pete Berg must have been impressed by how much dedication Rihanna showed; it would have been easy for her not to put as much effort in, because she was so busy promoting her albums and singles between filming her scenes.

Rihanna really respects him, too, and told
Q Magazine
what she thought when she first signed up: ‘Peter Berg is a genius. A movie based on a board game? How is that going to work? But I loved the script and it was perfect for my first role. I am a bad-ass tatted-up character called Weapons Officer Raikes. I know all there is to know about weapons on that ship. Can I act? Of course, but I am not telling you where I draw the experiences from. What do I think of when I want to do “angry”? That would be telling my secrets.’

Originally Berg had wanted to have Rihanna wear a navy cap in some scenes and then take it off for others but she looked too gorgeous without her cap and so he changed his mind. She kept it on and her hairstylist hardly had to do a thing.

Rihanna might have a body to die for but she herself has only started liking it in the last year or two. She has learned to embrace her womanly shape, and confessed to
Vogue
that the change came when she was preparing to play Raikes. She told them: ‘For the first time, I don’t want to get rid of the curves. I just want to tone it up. My body
is comfortable, and it’s not unhealthy, so I’m going to rock with it.

‘Over the holidays, and even during filming, I realised that I actually like my body, even if it’s not perfect according to the book. I just feel sexy.’

Rihanna’s co-actors rated her performance highly too, with Josh Pence telling MTV: ‘I had a scene with Rihanna. She was great! She brought it.

‘She came in, and I respect the fact that she’s willing to put a lot on the line, and it’s like Justin [Timberlake] with
The Social Network.
You know, they’ve got a lot to lose and a lot of people judging them. It takes a lot of courage.’

Josh plays Chief Moore, a combat systems co-ordinator, in
Battleship.
RiRi, Josh and the rest of the cast couldn’t wait for the movie to hit cinemas, so they must have been disappointed when the release date was pushed back to May 2012 instead of coming out in 2011 as originally planned.

On 19 December 2010, Rihanna tweeted: ‘I’m officially wrapped from Battleship! I’m gonna miss it, but it’s good to be home!’

She had finished her final filming stint in the last few weeks of November at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but she knew she would be on a film set again. She was looking forward to seeing what other scripts and parts she was offered, because she gets such a buzz from acting. She wants to be known as a great singer and actress!