Sabrina Carpenter is set to return to the big screen as Ginger Rogers in an upcoming Fred Astaire biopic starring Tom Holland.
Carpenter will play the legendary actor and dancer opposite Holland as Astaire, while The Substance star Margaret Qualley has joined the cast as Astaire’s older sister and original dance partner, Adele.
The still-untitled Sony Pictures film will be directed by Paul King, best known for Paddington, Paddington 2 and Wonka, and has been in development since Holland first confirmed his involvement in 2021.
“I am thrilled and honoured to have been entrusted with telling the story of Fred Astaire and his original dance partner – his big sister Adele – to the big screen,” King said in a statement.
“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.”
He continued: “The cinematic challenge of bringing to life these icons of the twentieth century is one that I could not imagine without Tom Holland, Margaret Qualley and Sabrina Carpenter by my side.”
The film will focus in part on Fred and Adele Astaire’s hugely successful partnership on Broadway and in London’s West End during the 1910s and ’20s, before Adele retired from performing in 1932 and Fred went on to become one of Hollywood’s defining musical stars.
He subsequently made 10 films with Rogers, including The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Swing Time and Shall We Dance, with the pair becoming one of cinema’s most celebrated dance partnerships.
The biopic is based on Kathleen Riley’s biography The Astaires: Fred & Adele, with Riley also involved as a story and script consultant.
Carpenter had a significant acting career before her current run as one of the world’s biggest pop stars. Before releasing her debut album, she appeared in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Orange Is The New Black, before landing her breakout role as Maya Hart in Disney Channel series Girl Meets World.
Her later film credits include The Hate U Give, Tall Girl, Work It, Tall Girl 2 and Emergency, although she has not appeared in a feature film since 2022.
Qualley recently appeared alongside Carpenter in the video for ‘House Tour’, which Carpenter also made a centrepiece of her Old Hollywood-inspired Coachella 2026 performance.
Holland, meanwhile, confirmed in July that the Astaire film would be his next project, following The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
“I did my first few rehearsals recently, and it both filled me with excitement and absolute dread because I’ve got so much work to do to try and do Fred proud,” he said.
“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.”
