All My Children star Josh Duhamel exited the ABC sudser last October, when his Leo du Pres character "drowned" in a waterfall's raging rapids. He returns to TV in NBC's Las Vegas — debuting Sept. 22 at 10 pm/ET — as a casino security pro who charms the ladies. But the 30-year-old heartthrob hasn't forgotten his soap-opera roots. The fans won't let him!

Profane trash talk comes as naturally to Next Friday star Mike Epps as breathing. So co-starring in the gospel-infused movie The Fighting Temptations (opening Sept. 12) proved quite challenging for him.

"This is the first movie that I've been in that I haven't cursed," Epps admits. "In all the other movies I've been in, I've cursed a hundred miles an hour.

"I can remember the first scene that I was in," he adds. "I must have said 'M.F.' three times before [Temptations director] Jonathan Lynn had to stop me and say, 'This ain't that movie, Mike.' I was like, 'Okay, let me get the vocab right.'"

While filming his next project, Resident Evil: Apocalypse (due out in 2004), Epps got right back into his bad habits. "They wrote a little cool guy in the movie that's cursin'," he laughs. "It's back to the R-rated, but this has been so great. I've gotten a chance to hold some guns and shoot them without going to jail!"

How did the foul-mouthed How High star land a role in the big-budget horror sequel in the first place? "The producer [Paul Anderson] called me up and offered it to me," he says. "It was strange, because I'm like, 'Wow, he knows who I am.' And when I got on the set, he's talking with his whole [British] accent, and I'm like, 'Man, how do you know me?' And he's like, 'Man, you know, we smoke marijuana, too.'