FOX, Jeffrey Mayer/Gettty Images No ExpirationJessica Lucas is best known for running from a killer monster in Cloverfield. That should have her well prepared for all the backstabbing beasties she's about to encounter.
The Canadian actress has just been cast as one of the leads in the CW's update of Melrose Place. Per the Hollywood Reporter, she will play resident Riley Richmond, a gorgeous, rich 24-year-old who's slumming it as an inner-city elementary school teacher. She is engaged but having doubts about her fiancé (Michael Rady).
Lucas, who recently had a stint on that other CW redo, 90210, joins a cast that includes Ashlee Simpson-Wentz and Katie Cassidy.
Meanwhile, Salma Hayek and Ellen DeGeneres lead the day's other big casting news:
• Hayek is joining the Saturday Night Live reunion that is Adam Sandler's latest project. The film costars cronies Chris Rock, Rob Schneider and David Spade as a group of high school best friends who reunite after 30 years. According to Variety, Hayek will play the wife of Sandler's character. Two other SNL vets, Maya Rudolph and Colin Quinn, are also on board. Shooting starts this summer.
• DeGeneres is dancing her way back to the big screen in an untitled comedy that Sex and the City scribe Jenny Bicks is writing and exec-producing. The plot finds Mother Nature (DeGeneres) returning to Earth for the first time since the planet's creation. Cameras roll during her upcoming daytime hiatus.
• Jesse Eisenberg (The Squid and the Whale) has been tapped to play Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings, an indie ensemble drama about a murder that led to the birth of the Beat Generation. Chris Evans and Ben Whishaw are also aboard as Jack Kerouac and Lucien Carr, the Columbia University student who first brought the famed Beat poets together.
• In today's nepotism news, Scott Eastwood has snagged a part in the untitled Nelson Mandela drama his father Clint Eastwood is directing for Warner Bros., which stars Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon. The film chronicles how the recently released Mandela (Freeman) joined forces with the captain of the national rugby team (Damon) to unite blacks and whites in the postapartheid era. The younger Eastwood will play a member of the South African team vying for the World Cup.