Empire, to our eternal shame, has never seen an episode of Las Vegas, the hit US TV show that stars James Caan (or did; he left recently to be replaced by the Godlike Tom Selleck) and Josh Duhamel.
Luckily for the series’ female lead, Molly Sims, several people in Hollywood have clearly been keeping a close eye on the show, while Empire instead blunders around in a netherworld of Sky Plussed Deal Or No Deal and Dragons’ Den.
For Sims today signed on to star in not one, but two – count ‘em, TWO! That’s one more than one and one less than three – new comedies.
First up, she’ll star alongside Jim Carrey in Peyton Reed’s The Yes Man, the big-screen movie version of our very own Danny Wallace’s book about a man who resolves to say yes to every question he’s asked, even though he doesn’t know where it’ll take him. (When we call Danny Wallace ‘our very own’, we mean that he’s British, not that he works for Empire.)
Sims, who is 34 and has only four movie credits to her name, including Starsky & Hutch and, God help us all, The Benchwarmers, will play Carrey’s ex-wife, whom he can’t get out of his head.
Next, Sims – whose name we’ve just realised means we could have built a clever computer game analogy in this story; but it’s far too late for that now – has also joined the cast of Harald Zwart’s The Pink Panther 2, in which Steve Martin returns as the bumbling Inspector Jacques Clouseau and, hopefully, reminds us all that he can be funny again (his new book, Born Standing Up, a rumination on his days as a comedian, goes a long way towards that. We can’t recommend it highly enough).
In that, Sims will play a news anchor who provides comment on Clouseau’s hilarious antics, much like a French Greek chorus, if that makes any sense.
Neither role seems like the female lead – Zooey Deschanel has that honour in The Yes Man, and Emily Mortimer returns in Panther 2 as Clouseau’s girlfriend, Nicole – but Sims must be delighted with her expansion pack. Sorry, we couldn’t resist. Too forced?