Paul King has spent the past several years directing Wonka and Paddington alongside its sequel, but his next production turns toward early twentieth-century stage and cinema history. The filmmaker's long-planned Fred Astaire biopic for Sony Pictures has cast Sabrina Carpenter as Ginger Rogers, placing her alongside Tom Holland in the title role. Margaret Qualley also joins the project as Adele Astaire, Fred's older sister and initial performing partner. The feature remains untitled and has spent several years in development, originating with Holland's initial confirmation of his involvement back in 2021. Rather than limiting itself to the familiar Hollywood routines, the story steps back to examine the sibling partnership that laid the groundwork for Fred's later career.
The film takes its foundation from Kathleen Riley's biography, The Astaires: Fred & Adele, with Riley serving as a story and script consultant on the production. Fred and Adele earned their reputation across Broadway and London's West End throughout the 1910s and 1920s, working as a celebrated duo until Adele chose to retire from show business in 1932. Her exit cleared the path for Fred to build a solo identity as a musical leading man in Hollywood. That reinvention led directly to his screen partnership with Rogers, which produced ten films together, including Top Hat, Swing Time, The Gay Divorcee, and Shall We Dance.
Revisiting Adele's lost legacy is a primary motivation for King. While Fred's career is preserved in meticulous detail across decades of motion pictures, Adele's dancing has slipped out of public recollection because no film footage of her work survives. King has highlighted the unusual hurdle of trying to depict two twentieth-century icons when one half of the pair possesses no archival video record at all. The director praised Holland, Qualley, and Carpenter for accepting the substantial dramatic and physical challenges required to recreate those early routines.
For Carpenter, stepping into Rogers' dancing shoes represents a deliberate pivot back to acting following her transition to stadium-level pop touring. Screen roles were the foundation of her early career, beginning with television guest spots on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Orange Is The New Black. She found wider visibility playing Maya Hart on the Disney Channel series Girl Meets World, which helped launch a run of feature film parts. Those credits include the drama The Hate U Give, the dance comedy Work It, both Tall Girl films, and the 2022 dramatic feature Emergency, her most recent cinematic appearance.
Carpenter and Qualley also share recent creative history. Qualley appeared alongside Carpenter in the music video for House Tour, an aesthetic Carpenter revisited when she adopted an Old Hollywood motif during her Coachella 2026 performance. Working together on King's set brings that visual familiarity to a project centered on the very era that informed their earlier video.
Holland, meanwhile, confirmed in July that the Astaire production will be his next immediate commitment once he finishes work on The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Preparing for the film has meant taking on rigorous dance instruction, an experience Holland has characterized as a balance of excitement and dread. He intends to perform every routine without using body doubles, with plans to shoot the tap and ballroom numbers in continuous, unbroken single takes. That staging method directly reflects the technical approach favored by Astaire and Rogers, whose musical sequences relied on sustained, full-body framing to let the dancing speak for itself.
