The May issue of Elle magazine will feature a so-hot right now cover girl: Rihanna. The singer is starring in her first summer blockbuster, Battleship, and is wrapping up production on her 2011 hit album Talk That Talk with some controversial collaborations with her ex-boyfriend, Chris Brown.

Elle tackles these concerns head-on, getting Rihanna on the record about her break up with Brown. “It gave me guns. I was like, well, f***. They know more about me than I want them to know. It’s embarrassing. But that was my opening. That was my liberation, my moment of bring it. […] Now you know that, so you can say what you want about it. I don’t have anything to hide,” Rihanna said.

(Elle magazine)

But Rihanna hints at some rebellion in the interview too. When pressed on her reaction to backlash from the press, fans, and the Internet in general on her recent collaborations with Brown, Rihanna replied, “People end up wasting their time on the blogs or whatever, ranting away, and that’s all right. Because tomorrow I’m still going to be the same person. I’m still going to do what I want to do.”

(Tom Munro; Styled by Joe Zee)

The shoot was designed by Elle as “a romantic narrative starring Rihanna as the fiery heroine in a passionate affair with a salsa dancer.” In addition to photographing, Tom Murno filmed Rihanna’s Elle shoot all as a movie. Between this piece of cinema and her role in Battleship, it seems Rihanna is serious about a second career in front of the camera. The singer recently told MTV News that she would love to play Whitney Houston in any forthcoming biopics, saying, “That would be something that I would have to give my entire life to do, because I would really want to pull it off.”

(Tom Munro; Styled by Joe Zee)

-Courtney E. Smith, CBS Local