Sabrina Carpenter is going back to the movies to play one of the most famous dancers in Hollywood history. She will portray Ginger Rogers in Sony Pictures’ untitled Fred Astaire biopic, opposite Tom Holland as Astaire, with Margaret Qualley as his sister Adele, Deadline reported in an exclusive on Friday 25 September.
The film is directed by Paul King, of Wonka and Paddington, and produced by Amy Pascal. For Carpenter, it is the first starring film role since her 2024 hit “Espresso”, RTÉ noted, and it caps a year in which she has performed at the Grammys, headlined Coachella and collaborated with Madonna, as Pitchfork pointed out.
Who Plays Whom in the Astaire Film
Holland plays Fred Astaire. Qualley plays Adele Astaire, Fred’s older sister and original dance partner; the siblings were major stars on Broadway and in London’s West End in the 1920s before Fred went on to become one of cinema’s greatest stars, according to Variety. Carpenter plays Rogers, the co-star and dance partner with whom Astaire made his most famous films.
The casting completes a triangle of dance partnerships at the heart of the story: the brother-and-sister act that came first, and the screen pairing that made Astaire a film legend. Holland has been attached to the project for five years, and Deadline noted that the new castings come nearly five years after he first revealed he would lead it.
What Paul King Said About the Casting
King framed the film around both partnerships. “I am thrilled and honored to have been entrusted with telling the story of Fred Astaire and his original dance partner — his big sister Adele — to the big screen,” he said in a statement.
King most recently directed Wonka, the Warner Bros musical starring Timothée Chalamet. He also directed the first two Paddington films, which together earned nearly $500 million worldwide, executive produced Paddington in Peru and is writing a Wonka sequel, Deadline noted.
He pointed to the gap in the historical record that the film has to fill. “Fred left a timeless legacy of dance on film, most famously in his collaborations with Ginger Rogers, while Adele’s work has been lost to history; indeed, no footage of her dancing survives,” King said. “The cinematic challenge of bringing to life these icons of the 20th century is one that I could not imagine without Tom Holland, Margaret Qualley and Sabrina Carpenter by my side.”
Ginger Rogers, the Role Carpenter Takes On
Carpenter inherits a formidable part. Rogers starred alongside Astaire in a run of song-and-dance films through the 1930s and 1940s, and the pair became known for an on-screen partnership built on complicated routines, RTÉ reported. Variety listed the classics among them: The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1935) and Swing Time (1936), with RTÉ adding The Barkleys of Broadway.
Rogers was also a star in her own right, winning a Best Actress Academy Award for Kitty Foyle in 1941, RTÉ noted. Astaire, for his part, starred in more than 30 film musicals across a seven-decade career on stage and screen, according to Variety.
Carpenter’s Screen Career Before Music Took Over
The role is a return rather than a debut. Carpenter began her career as an actress on the Disney Channel and has appeared in films including Tall Girl, The Hate U Give and Emergency, RTÉ noted, while Deadline also listed The Short History of the Long Road and Work It. Now 27, she is best known for songs such as “Espresso” and “Taste”.
Her screen work has picked up again alongside the music. Pitchfork reported that she won her first Emmy for executive producing and performing in The Muppet Show, a special for Disney+, and described the casting as capping an already stacked year for the Man’s Best Friend singer. Pitchfork had ranked Man’s Best Friend No. 17 among its 30 best pop albums of 2025.
A Reunion With Margaret Qualley
Carpenter and Qualley have worked together before. Qualley appeared in Carpenter’s 2026 music video for “House Tour”, RTÉ reported, and that video won Best Editing at the MTV VMAs on 27 September, according to Billboard’s winners list. The same night, “Bring Your Love”, Carpenter’s duet with Madonna, won Best Collaboration.
Qualley, 31, is a Golden Globe nominee whose credits include Maid, The Substance and Love of Your Life, Variety noted, and Deadline added Emmy nominations for Fosse/Verdon and Maid. Her Golden Globe nomination came for The Substance, opposite Demi Moore, a film that received multiple Oscar nominations including Best Picture, and she made her television debut on HBO’s The Leftovers, with Palo Alto as her debut film. She most recently starred in The Dog Stars alongside Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin and Guy Pearce, and her credits also include Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness, according to Deadline. Playing Adele, a performer whose dancing survives only in accounts rather than on film, may be the more open-ended of the two roles.
Tom Holland Wants to Do Every Step Himself
Holland started out as a dancer, playing the title role in Billy Elliot the Musical in the West End from 2008 to 2010, and he has been rehearsing for the part, Variety reported. “I’m diving back into the dance studio,” he said on Good Morning America. He has also set himself a high bar: “I have a desire to use no doubles, to do all of the dancing, to shoot those dances in one shot — how he would have done it.”
He comes to the project after a summer at the top of the box office. Variety called Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey the two highest-grossing films of 2026, and Deadline, which said Brand New Day is breaking box office records, put their worldwide grosses at more than $2 billion and more than $1.72 billion respectively.
The Team Behind the Film
King wrote the script with Steven Levenson, based on Kathleen Riley’s book The Astaires: Fred & Adele, and Riley is a script and story consultant. Producers are Amy Pascal and Rachel O’Connor for Pascal Pictures, Ben Holden and Josh Hyams for Lightbulb Pictures, and Holland for his Billy17 banner, Deadline reported. Harry Holland and Will South are executive producers for Billy17, alongside Will Clarke and Andy Mayson of Altitude Films and Levenson. Fred Astaire’s daughter, Ava Astaire McKenzie, supports the project, and her son Tyler McKenzie is a consultant and co-producer.
“I’m delighted to support this endeavor to celebrate the extraordinary careers and enduring legacy of my father and aunt, who were among the biggest musical stars of their era,” Astaire McKenzie said, adding that with Riley’s “seminal biography as its foundation”, the story of their partnership on and off the stage “is in the best care”. Tyler McKenzie said he knew the siblings’ legacy would be “beautifully brought to life for a whole new generation”. It is a busy autumn for pop’s biggest names on every front; topmusic.news recently covered how Taylor Swift added four songs to an album she had called complete. The casting reports did not include a release date for the Astaire film, so for now Sabrina Carpenter simply has a new kind of partner to rehearse with.
About Author
