TV Guide Online: Since Island nearly fell off the map during its second season, should we expect any big changes this time around?
Mark L. Walberg: The way we reveal vote-offs and date selections and things like that might be a little different, but the biggest difference is the personalities [of the couples involved]. Each season, our show is as unique as the couples' problems and choices.

TVGO: Bummer — I was hoping for a clothing-optional episode. Tell me about playing the island's pseudo-shrink.
Walberg: Those bonfires are pretty interesting. At the same time, I dread every one of them. You rarely get an opportunity to fly without a net like that. There's no script, no earpiece, no cue cards. There's little planning. The producers just give me an idea of what we hope to find and where they would like me to steer [the conversation], then when it starts going, man! You just sort of have to stay on your toes.

TVGO: Now we're talkin'! You're a manipulative rat after my own heart.
Walberg: Actually, [the swinging singles] think we're leading them, but it really becomes more an exercise in following them. And in my situation, it's neither leading nor following, but sort of investigating what is the true emotion around their actions.

TVGO: That's okay, Mark; your secret's safe with me. You must be rakin' it in, being so psychologically savvy — Fox mustn't stand a chance come contract-renewal time.
Walberg: (Laughs) I only wish I was as effective in that arena as I am in the bonfires. Actually, they should make my contract conditional upon how many tears are elicited at a bonfire. Then I'd be rich.

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!

"Because [we shoot in] Vegas, they feel free to do anything," says Las Vegas creator Gary Scott Thompson. "On our first night of shooting, we had Josh on Fremont Street in a car. It was St. Patrick's Day, and as the night got longer, the drunker people got. By the end of the night, there was 20,000 of them, at least, screaming his character's name from All My Children. 'Why did they kill you, Leo? Leo!'"

Duhamel — who says "Leo is a part of me" — has come to expect gawking tourists at work. This season of Las Vegas wasn't filmed exclusively on a closed-off Hollywood set, but right in the heart of real, live casinos Mandalay Bay and the Palms. "They don't actually shut down the casino," he says. "They just shut down a little corner of it, so it's almost like we're monkeys in a cage at some points, because it's a huge casino, and they're not going to shut down the traffic of the patrons. They bring a lot more money in than [we do]."

But back to the ladies. Among Duhamel's female admirers in the pilot is Molly Sims, with whom he hits the sheets. When the actress got nervous about their simulated sex scene, he lightened things up, in his typical goofy way. "I said, 'If something happens down there, I'm sorry. And if something doesn't happen, I'm sorry.'"

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.'

"It was the marijuana connection!" Epps marvels. "Damn, it is amazing what drugs in a movie do." Remember kids, just say no.