Tom Holland has finally found both of Fred Astaire’s most important dance partners.
Margaret Qualley and Sabrina Carpenter have joined Sony Pictures’ still-untitled Fred Astaire biopic, with Qualley set to play Adele Astaire, Fred’s older sister and original stage partner, and Carpenter portraying Ginger Rogers, his legendary Hollywood co-star. Holland remains attached as Fred Astaire, while Paddington and Wonka filmmaker Paul King will direct.
The two additions are more revealing than a normal casting announcement because they suggest the movie will span two very different chapters of Astaire’s career: the stage partnership with Adele that made him famous before Hollywood, and the Fred-and-Ginger films that eventually made him a screen icon.
Margaret Qualley will play the less familiar Astaire
Qualley’s casting may be particularly important to what King wants the movie to accomplish.
Long before Fred Astaire became synonymous with Hollywood musicals, he performed extensively with his sister Adele. The siblings became major attractions on Broadway and London’s West End before Adele retired from performing in the early 1930s.
Unlike Fred’s later movie career, however, Adele’s dancing has largely disappeared from the visual record.
King highlighted that problem when announcing the new cast, noting that “no footage of her dancing survives.” He described the film as an opportunity to bring Fred and his “original dance partner” back to the screen together.
Qualley is also an unusually logical choice for the role. Before establishing herself as an actor, she trained seriously in ballet, including studying at the North Carolina School of the Arts and spending time as an apprentice with the American Ballet Theatre.
That background could matter if King intends to recreate Fred and Adele’s stage routines rather than simply reference them through dialogue.
Sabrina Carpenter takes on Ginger Rogers
Carpenter’s casting shifts the movie into a completely different period.
She will portray Ginger Rogers, whose partnership with Astaire became one of the defining screen pairings of Hollywood’s musical era. Together, Astaire and Rogers appeared in films including Top Hat, Swing Time and The Gay Divorcee.
Carpenter is currently better known as a Grammy-winning pop star, but she began her career as an actor and has extensive experience performing choreography onstage. Her casting also signals a return to a substantial film role after music became the dominant focus of her career.
More importantly, casting both Adele and Ginger confirms that the biopic will not focus solely on Astaire’s childhood or his early partnership with his sister.
The screenplay, written by King and Steven Levenson, is based on Kathleen Riley’s The Astaires: Fred & Adele. Carpenter’s involvement makes clear that the story will continue into at least part of Fred’s Hollywood career after Adele leaves the act.
Tom Holland wants to do the dancing himself
Holland has been preparing for the role for some time.
Before becoming Spider-Man, he played Billy Elliot on the West End, giving him a significant dance background of his own. More recently, Holland said he had returned to dance rehearsals specifically for the Astaire film and described the process as both exciting and intimidating.
He has also said he wants to avoid dance doubles where possible and recreate Astaire’s famous long-take approach, performing complete routines in camera rather than building them primarily through editing.
That ambition becomes considerably more interesting now that Qualley and Carpenter are involved.
The project is no longer simply about whether Holland can convincingly imitate Fred Astaire. It now has to recreate three distinct performance relationships: Fred and Adele as siblings building a stage career, Fred establishing himself alone, and Fred and Ginger creating a completely different style for cinema.
King appears to understand that distinction. His comments have emphasized not just Astaire’s famous Hollywood legacy, but the opportunity to restore Adele’s largely forgotten contribution to the story.
Holland is also producing through his Billy17 banner alongside Amy Pascal and Rachel O’Connor, with Ben Holden and Josh Hyams producing for Lightbulb Pictures.
Sony has not yet announced a title or theatrical release date.
But the addition of Qualley and Carpenter gives the project a much clearer shape. Instead of telling the familiar story of Fred Astaire the Hollywood legend, King appears to be building a film about the two partnerships that defined him—one that history barely preserved, and another that cinema made impossible to forget.
