Matt Cedeno Frank Grillo and Billy Magnussen soap alums
Credit: Image: Jill Johnson, Howard Wise/JPI

Soap alums Matt Cedeno, Frank Grillo and Billy Magnussen in new exiting roles.

Matt Cedeno in soapy thriller, Ruthless

Matt Cedeno, ex Brandon Walker on Days of our Lives, has been cast in Tyler Perry’s upcoming soapy thriller Ruthless, which is a spin-off of BET’s The Oval. The show sees Ruth Truesdale (Melissa L. Williams) forced to play nice with a scandalous religious cult of powerful sex-crazed fanatics in the hopes of freeing herself and her daughter. The show also stars Stephanie Charles, Anthony Bless and Bobbi Baker James. It is set to debut in 2020 on BET Plus, the network’s streaming service. Perry will write, direct, and executive produce the show with Michelle Sneed for Tyler Perry Studios. Cedeno currently appears as billionaire textiles mogul Ignacio Santos on Ambitions, which Soaps.com recaps weekly.

Frank Grillo’s upcoming action films

Frank Grillo, who played Hart Jessup on Guiding Light, will join Mel Gibson (Lethal Weapon) in the upcoming action thriller Leo from Toledo directed by Joe Carnahan. The movie is based on an original script from Dan Casey which follows a former killer for the Kansas City mob, who is hiding in witness protection and has trouble remembering simple things. What he remembers he wants to forget, but what he has forgotten has made him a hunted man with little time to save what he does have left, his estranged daughter and granddaughter. Gibson, Grillo and Carnahan have also recently completed the film Boss Level, an action sci-fi thriller about a retired Special Forces officer who is trapped in a never-ending time loop on the day of his death.

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Billy Magnussen in HBO Max’s Mad for Love

Billy Magnussen, former Casey Hughes on As the World Turns, is set to appear in several episodes of HBO Max’s half-hour series Made for Love. The show is an adaptation based on Alissa Nutting’s tragicomic novel and is billed as a dark, absurd and cynically poignant story of divorce and revenge. The show finds Hazel Green (Cristin Milioti, How I Met Your Mother), a woman on the run after 10 years of marriage to Byron Gogol, an unstable, needy, possibly sociopathic tech billionaire. She soon discovers that her husband has been monitoring her every move, thought and feeling after implanting a revolutionary monitoring device, the Made for Love chip, in her brain. The show is also set to star Ray Romano (Everybody Loves Raymond) as Hazel’s father Herbert Green.