Sabrina CarpenterArtist profile →
Sabrina Carpenter took Old Hollywood to Coachella this year. Next, she plays it for real. Carpenter will star as Ginger Rogers in Sony’s untitled Fred Astaire biopic, opposite Tom Holland as Astaire, Deadline reported on Sept. 25. Margaret Qualley, her co-star in the “House Tour” video, plays Fred’s older sister and first dance partner, Adele.
Paul King, who directed Paddington, Paddington 2 and Wonka, is making it. He wrote the script with Steven Levenson from Kathleen Riley’s biography The Astaires: Fred & Adele, and the producers include Amy Pascal, Rachel O’Connor and Holland himself, through his company Billy17. Fred’s daughter, Ava Astaire McKenzie, is backing the project, and her son, Tyler McKenzie, is a consultant and co-producer.
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.
Paul King, director, Deadline
That’s the film’s double act. Fred and Adele were stars on Broadway and in London’s West End in the 1910s and ’20s, until Adele retired in 1932. Fred then made 10 films with Rogers, including Top Hat, Swing Time and Shall We Dance, and the pair became one of cinema’s most celebrated dance partnerships, NME notes.
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For Carpenter, it’s a return to the job she started in. Before the pop run, she played Maya Hart on Disney Channel’s Girl Meets World, then appeared in The Hate U Give, Tall Girl, Work It and Emergency. She hasn’t made a feature film since 2022.
Holland, who started out as a dancer in Billy Elliot the Musical in the West End, is coming off two billion-dollar hits, Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey. He confirmed in July that Astaire was next, and that he wants to dance it himself. “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 said, per NME. He has also said his first rehearsals left him with “excitement and absolute dread.”
Carpenter and Qualley already have a head start on the chemistry. Qualley appears in the “House Tour” video, which Carpenter made a centerpiece of her Coachella 2026 set. Watch it below.
The film is still untitled, and Sony hasn’t set a release date. King’s statement sums up the brief: bringing Fred and Adele to the screen is a challenge he “could not imagine without Tom Holland, Margaret Qualley and Sabrina Carpenter by my side.”
- Film
- Untitled Fred Astaire biopic, Sony Pictures
- Director
- Paul King
- Cast
- Tom Holland, Sabrina Carpenter, Margaret Qualley
- Based on
- The Astaires: Fred & Adele, by Kathleen Riley
- Release
- Not yet dated
Added to the High Grailed archive on October 11, 2026.
