News: Simon Pegg

Former Shaun of the Dead and Spaced star Pegg is, with this week’s Hot Fuzz, making yet another strong case that he’s the first British comic with a real chance to make it big in America since Peter Sellers – but will he be able to maintain the momentum?

He’s certainly got a fair few more in the works – from a planned new sitcom about a pub quiz team (with his Spaced, Shaun and Hot Fuzz co-star and real-world best buddy Nick Frost), La Triviata, due some time this year through to the animated stoner comedy Free Jimmy, for which Pegg wrote the English screenplay (it was originally Norwegian) about a junkie elephant on the run and provides voice duties alongside the likes of Woody Harrelson, Kyle MacLachlan, Samantha Morton, David Tennant, Emilia Fox and Phil Daniels.

But there are also some bigger projects on the way, like the romantic comedy The Good Night, with Martin Freeman, Penelope Cruz, Danny DeVito, Gwyneth Paltrow and Michael Gambon, or former Friends star David Schwimmer’s directorial debut Run, Frat Boy, Run, with Pegg starring alongside Thandie Newton and The Simpsons‘ Hank Azaria.

By far the most promising, however, is Pegg’s starring role in a big screen adaptation of Toby Young’s bestselling memoir of life at a high-end New York magazine, How to Lose Freinds and Alienate People – to be directed by Robert B Weide, best known for his work on the cult comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm. That could well be enough to get Pegg into the Hollywood comedy A-list…

News: Toby Jones

Odd-faced British thesp Toby Jones does a good job as truman Capote in this week’s Infamous, despite following a tough act in Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Oscar-winning performance in last year’s Capote.

A leading role for this top-notch character actor is rare, but he’s got a fair few supporting turns in the works, like playing the Duke of Clarence (aka the future King William IV) in Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace, looking at the efforts of reformer William Wilberforce to end slavery in the British Empire during the early 19th century. It’s due to hit our screens in March.

Then it’s shift forward to the 1920s for Somerset Maugham adaptation The Painted Veil, a romantic drama set in Shanghai during a cholera epidemic, before leaping back to the 17th century for notorious director Peter Greenaway’s Nightwatching, based around the life of Rembrandt – to be played, somewhat implausibly, by The Office‘s Martin Freeman.

Then there’s yet another historical drama – A Harlot’s Progress – but this time with Jones in the lead as artist William Hogarth, whose relationship with a prostitute helps inspire one of his most famous works. It’s due out in November.

News: Gwyneth Paltrow

Following her turn in this week’s Infamous, Paltrow looks set to be on our screens rather more in coming months, following a break of a couple of years to start raising her family in which she’s mostly just appeared in the tabloids.

Next up – out in the UK on 2nd February – is the quirky comedy drama Running With Scissors, about a teenager from a troubled household who ends up living with his psychiatrist’s bizarre family for a year. Alongside Paltrow are some big and up-and-coming names, from her Shakespeare in Love co-star Joseph Feinnes through Alec Baldwin, Annette Benning, Evan Rachel Wood and Patrick Wilson. Could be good.

She’ll keep up the family theme with The Good Night, directed by her brother, Jake. Starring Martin Freeman asa former popstar turned advertising jingle writer who’s having a mid life crisis, the impressive cast includes the likes of Penelope Cruz, Danny De Vito and Simon Pegg. Another British-based movie – unsurprising as Paltrow now lives pretty much exclusively in London – is Love and other Distaters, a romantic comedy revolving around an American intern at the British version of fashion mag Vogue, and co-starring the likes of Orlando Bloom and Stephanie Beacham.

Then come her two biggest projects, bothe decidedly more American. She has just signed on to star alongside Robert Downey Jr in the big screen adaptation of comic book superhero Iron Man, due out next year and sure to be huge. But more interesting is Dirty Tricks – a drama set during the fallout from the Watergate affair, with Jim Broadbent brilliantly cast as disgraced President Richard Nixon, and co-starring the likes of Brad Pitt, Annette Benning, Sharon Stone and Meryl Streep. That could prove very promising indeed.

News: Jude Law

While not appearing in the gossip sections of the tabloids over the latest rumours about his relationship with rising starlet Sienna Miller, All the King’s Men’s Law has been a busy boy, having taken most of last year off. First up is The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley director Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering where, alongside Juliet Binoche, Ray Winstone, Martin Freeman and his King’s Men co-star Sean Penn’s wife Robin Wright Penn, Law will play a landscape architect to starts to reassess his life after a run-in with a young burglar.

Next up will be The Holiday, where Law’s King’s Men co-star Kate Winslett plays an unluck-in-love woman who does a house-swap with an equally unfortunate woman, played by Cameron Diaz, in an attempt to turn her life around. Law plays one of the bits of male eye-candy, alongside Rufus Sewell and, somewhat implausibly, scruffy tubster Jack Black.

After a small role in cult Chinese director Wong Kar-Wai’s American road trip movie My Blueberry Nights, hopefully due out in the UK sometime late next year, Law’s most promising – and at the same time most worrying – upcoming project is Sleuth. Starring alongside Michael Caine – who seems to have forgiven Law for destroying his classic character Alfie in the abysmal 2004 remake – this is yet another remake of a British classic, the 1972 flick of the same name in which the younger Caine entered a battle of wits with Laurence Olivier over a marital infidelity. We can but hope that yet more cinematic memories aren’t soiled in the process…