* Ken Jeong has joined Ice Cube, Kevin Hart, and Olivia Munn for Ride Along 2, the sequel to this year's buddy cop comedy that broke $150M at the box office. He'll play "a cocky computer hacker who fancies himself a ladies man but who also is key in solving the case that Cube and Hart are working on." While this could possibly be very irritating having Jeong and Hart sharing scenes together, this will be the rare time when Jeong can look down on somebody. [THR]
* HBO is adding some familiar faces to the cast of Bessie, Queen Latifah and Dee Rees' biopic on blues singer, Bessie Smith. Oliver Platt has come aboard the film along with Bryan Greenberg (How to Make It In America) and Tory Kittles (True Detective), with Latifah as the iconic singer who became known as the Empress of the Blues for her acclaimed performances in the 1920s and '30s. Platt will play photographer and writer Carl Van Vechten, Kittles is Bessie brother Clarence, and Greenberg is renowned record producer and music critic John Hammond [Deadline]
* That other Chef movie, the one led by Bradley Cooper, continues to add a number of promising ingredients to the pot. Cooper, Sienna Miller, and Omar Sy have now been joined in the kitchen by Irish actor Sam Keely. Keely's a rising star who has a role in Ron Howard's In the Heart of the Sea and the upcoming sequel Monsters: Dark Continent. Chef, which hopefully will undergo a name change to avoid confusion, has Cooper as a Parfs chef who loses everything because of his hard partying ways. After sobering up he assembles a team to start anew by heading a restaurant that can earn the coveted 3-star Micheline rating.
