Meghan lands a special guest for new season of her Netflix show… but there will be no sign of Harry this time round, reveals ALISON BOSHOFF

The much-hyped launch of With Love, Meghan on Netflix was quickly followed by confusion over which friends, exactly, the Duchess was inviting over to share the love.

The biggest ‘name’ in the first series was actress Mindy Kaling; but many of the others, such as ‘bestie’ make-up artist Daniel Martin, were far from famous.

But I can reveal she’s landed someone much better-known for the next instalment of the show: model, TV personality and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen.

The ‘second series’ was actually filmed back to back with the first, in the spring of last year, before Meghan had settled on a brand name – or even which products she would be selling. It’s due to stream on Netflix from this autumn.

I’m told: ‘Chrissy is the big name in series two, and they have been friends for a long time.’ On the downside: ‘There is no sign of Harry at all in this one, and nothing of the children either.’

Prince Harry made the briefest of appearances at the end of the first series – at a ‘celebration brunch’ to mark the launch of his wife’s new venture. ‘Well done, you did a really great job, and I love it,’ he says, before raising a glass of champagne: ‘To you!’

Meghan and Chrissy have much in common. Both appeared as ‘Briefcase Girls’ on game show Deal Or No Deal in the US – Chrissy from the first season in 2005 and Meghan in 2006 and 2007. (Teigen was briefcase #12; and Meghan briefcase #24.)

In an interview in 2018, Chrissy said: ‘I am especially a fan of Meghan. I was on Deal Or No Deal with her and she was lovely.’

They bonded further after Meghan wrote to Chrissy when she lost her unborn baby, Jack, at 20 weeks, in September of 2020. A few months earlier, Meghan had suffered a miscarriage – something she’d reveal later that year.

Chrissy, who’s married to singer John Legend, with whom she has four other children, said: ‘She’s been so kind to me ever since we connected, she had written to me about baby Jack, and loss.’

Both women also know what it’s like to be at the eye of a media storm, with Meghan having been accused of bullying staff (denied by friends) and Teigen having been ‘cancelled’ in 2021, after old Tweets of hers resurfaced.

Courtney Stodden, a US TV personality, said in an interview that ten years previously, when she became famous as the 16-year-old bride of acting coach Doug Hutchinson, Teigen had mocked her on Twitter and sent her a private message telling her to kill herself. Teigen later apologised and described herself in that period as ‘an insecure, attention-seeking troll’.

Chrissy is a bigger name in food than Meghan, with three hit cookbooks, including her 2016 New York Times bestseller Cravings: Recipes For All Of The Food You Want To Eat. She also runs a website which sells cookie mixes (like Meghan’s As Ever) and cake mixes, plus cookware.

A second series of With Love, Meghan was announced less than a week after the first aired. The first series featured the Duchess’s ‘tips and tricks for hosting and adding more fun and thoughtfulness to the everyday’.

That’s a new look for you, Sister Michael

Siobhan McSweeney has a ball as the dying mother of flamboyant aristocrat Henry Paget, the fifth Marquess of Anglesey, in the film Madfabulous.

The forthcoming drama is being screened in Cannes, and this picture (below) is a first look at McSweeney as Blanche Mary Boyd, second wife of the 4th Marquess, with Callum Scott Howells as her son. Quite a departure from Sister Michael in Derry Girls.

Eccentric and outrageous, Paget inherited an income equivalent to £15 million a year when he was 23… which he blew on jewels and a theatre company, before dying, bankrupt, in 1905, aged just 29.

Of McSweeney, director Celyn Jones said: ‘I cannot wait for audiences to see this performance.’

The Marquess’s devoted manservant is played by Rupert Everett and Lady Clara Paget — the daughter of the current marquess — has a pivotal role, too.

Cap that! Nothing but the best for Leo’s girl 

Leonardo DiCaprio’s stunning girlfriend, Vittoria Ceretti, 26, brought old-school glamour to the Cannes film festival this week.

Wearing Armani Privé haute couture and Messika diamonds, Vittoria (below) accompanied her 50-year-old boyfriend to the opening ceremony on Tuesday, where he presented an honorary Palme D’Or to his friend and sometime co-star Robert De Niro.

De Niro, 81, is attending the festival with his girlfriend, Tiffany Chen (a martial arts instructor who originally trained in dance) and his daughter Helen Grace, 13, by former wife Grace Hightower.

I’m told that both A-listers are staying at the Hotel du Cap, just outside Cannes, fabled for its starry history, incredible parties – and sky-high prices.

It’s a sign of the times that not one film studio is throwing a bash at the du Cap this year. Marketing money is going elsewhere, and delegates have noticed the lack of the usual stunts and mega billboards at the festival.

Tom Cruise didn’t rock up on a motorbike or drop down from the roof for the premiere of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning on Wednesday, despite rumours that he might. And the end of the Martinez pier, normally home to a huge billboard, is actually empty this year.

Dakota Johnson is at the heart of a partner swapping drama, Splitsville, showing in Cannes. She explains: ‘It’s less of a love triangle and more of a love experiment. 

It’s enmeshed, co-dependent, incestuous – and all the while deeply loving – but pretty ****ed up a lot of the time.’ 

Asked how she felt about ‘non-monogamy’, Dakota, who’s dating Coldplay’s Chris Martin, said: ‘Why not, really. But also scary, you know?’

No stunt too big, no task too small for team player Tom 

Everyone focuses on the stunts performed by Tom Cruise in the Mission: Impossible films, but his friend Chris McQuarrie says his dedication extends to the little things, too.

It is, you may be surprised to hear, common for big stars to use ‘stand-ins’ in scenes where the actor’s face isn’t visible. But not Cruise.

Speaking during the Cannes film festival, where Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning was premiered, McQuarrie (who directed the picture) was full of praise for his leading man.

‘Every time you see a hand on a steering wheel or a foot on an accelerator, it’s Tom Cruise. I mean, anyone could do it. Anyone could be wearing the shoe. But it’s Tom.’

As for Cruise, he insisted it’s all part of the job: ‘I really like doing it myself. I like being on set. We’re looking for lightning in a bottle, so anyone has an idea, who wants to try something, we want to create time and space for it.’

As for those stunts… the director said: ‘You come up with a plan, you design meticulously, you pat yourself on the back – and then physics hits you in the face.’

The submarine sequence in Final Reckoning (which you can see when it opens in the UK next week) was years in the making, and involved filming in a rotating water tank. 

They did a dummy run in miniature with a plastic figure… which got smashed to bits. Leading to the addition of safety cables.

Mesdames et messieurs! Allow me to present the Dandy of Cannes… Jeremy Strong.

The American actor, who played Kendall Roy in TV’s Succession, is a member of the festival’s jury and has delighted crowds by appearing in a pink Lanvin ensemble — complete with £900 sneakers and matching (pink corduroy) bucket hat. 

How to top that? What about a salmon Loro Piana tux, and a £250,000 Swiss-made Richard Mille watch?

Red letter day for Scarlett, the novice director 

Scarlett Johansson is on the Croisette this year as a director rather than an actress, with her directorial debut Eleanor The Great, starring 95-year-old June Squibb, in the Un Certain Regard line-up at the festival.

Johansson, 40, said she was suffering from ‘nerve-citement’ ahead of the premiere next Tuesday, but was quietly confident she’d put in enough hours to have mastery of the movie business.

‘Whatever the 10,000 hours part of it is, I’ve quadrupled that,’ she said. ‘I grew up on sets and I’m a huge sucker for efficiency. Even in my job as an actor, I can read a call sheet and tell you exactly what’s going to make us fall behind, and what we’ll owe the next day.’

Of her first film behind the camera, she said: ‘I’m very proud of it – and very proud of all the work that everybody did to make it.’ And what kind of a director is she? ‘I rule with an iron fist,’ she joked. ‘I have my own tent and nobody can come in there – ever.’

The incredible Squibb, plays a woman who relocates from Florida to New York to live with her daughter and grandson.

Fans will be relieved to hear that Johansson is not giving up the day job just yet. She’s also going to walk the Cannes red carpet to support Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, in which she has a role – and has been filming Jurassic World Rebirth.

Harris Dickinson, who’s playing John Lennon in Sam Mendes’s four films about the Beatles, says he’s getting immersed in the role. 

Dickinson, who’s directed a film called Urchin, on at Cannes, says of the Fab Four: ‘They’re becoming dearer to me, the more I go on the journey of understanding John and the rest of them. I’ll be doing (the films) for the next however long it will be. That’s all I’ll be doing.’ 

Could a German film scoop the Palme D’Or this year?

Sound Of Falling, by German filmmaker Mascha Schilinski, premiered to rave reviews across the board on Wednesday afternoon in Cannes, with critics hailing it as an instant ‘for all time’ classic. 

The atmospheric film tells the story of four girls Alma, Erika, Angelika and Lenka who spend their youth on the same farm in northern Germany, but decades apart; and it plays with ideas about mortality and memory.