Sabrina Carpenter and Margaret Qualley join Tom Holland's Fred Astaire biopic

Sony Pictures has cast Sabrina Carpenter and Margaret Qualley opposite Tom Holland in its long-in-development Fred Astaire biopic, filling out the central trio at the heart of a film built around the dancer's rise from vaudeville stages to Hollywood soundstages. Carpenter will play Ginger Rogers, Astaire's most famous screen partner, while Qualley will play Adele Astaire, Fred's older sister and the first dance partner who made him a star. The casting was confirmed this week by the studio and reported by TheWrap, with additional detail from JoBlo and The A.V. Club.

The still-untitled film is directed by Paul King, who made Wonka and the two Paddington films, from a screenplay he co-wrote with Steven Levenson. It draws on Kathleen Riley's biography "The Astaires: Fred & Adele," which traces the sibling act that Fred and Adele Astaire built on Broadway and in London's West End in the 1910s and 1920s, before Adele's retirement from performing in 1932 sent Fred to Hollywood, where he was eventually paired with Rogers.

The numbers

Astaire and Rogers made ten films together between 1933 and 1949, nine of them for RKO Pictures, according to the American Film Institute's catalog, which lists the 1935 entry "Top Hat" among the AFI's 25 greatest American musicals. King's own box-office track record is a large part of why Sony is betting on him for a project this expensive to mount: "Wonka" grossed $634.7 million worldwide, according to box-office data compiled by The Numbers, making it the biggest hit of his directing career. Carpenter, for her part, arrives with her own commercial pull; her seventh studio album, "Man's Best Friend," debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, a launch Universal Music Canada's press office called the biggest week of the year at that point for an album by a woman.

Holland has been attached to play Astaire since December 2021, when he confirmed the project while promoting "Spider-Man: No Way Home." Nearly five years later, the film finally has its full central cast, along with the outline of a production team that includes:

• Amy Pascal and Rachel O'Connor producing for Pascal Pictures
• Ben Holden and Josh Hyams producing for Lightbulb Pictures
• Tom Holland producing through his own Billy17 banner
• Tyler McKenzie, Ava Astaire McKenzie's son, serving as a consultant and co-producer

How the project got here

Holland has spoken publicly about the role only sparingly since his initial confirmation, but he gave an update in July while doing press for "Spider-Man: Brand New Day." Appearing on "Good Morning America," he said the Astaire film would be his next project once his promotional obligations wrapped, and described his first stretch of rehearsals in terms that suggested the scale of what he has taken on. Holland, who spent two years playing the title role in the West End production of "Billy Elliot" as a teenager, has said he wants to dance every number himself, without a double, filmed in long, unbroken takes in the manner Astaire insisted on for his own musical numbers.

The project has moved slowly by design. Riley's book, on which the screenplay is based, focuses less on Astaire's better-known Hollywood years with Rogers than on the earlier partnership with his sister, whose own dancing survives in no footage at all. That gap is part of what drew King to the material, according to the director, who has said the story only works as a study of both siblings rather than as a conventional Astaire-and-Rogers retelling.

Who is taking on the roles

Qualley, the daughter of actress Andie MacDowell, trained as a ballet dancer before turning to acting and has built a run of high-profile film roles in recent years, including Yorgos Lanthimos' "Poor Things" and "Kinds of Kindness" and a Golden Globe-nominated turn in "The Substance." Carpenter has dance training of her own dating to childhood and appeared in the 2020 Netflix dance film "Work It" before her music career grew into the arena-filling draw it is today.

The Astaire family has publicly endorsed the casting. Ava Astaire McKenzie, Fred Astaire's daughter, said in a statement provided to outlets covering the announcement that she was "delighted to support this endeavor to celebrate the extraordinary careers and enduring legacy of my father and aunt." Her son, Tyler McKenzie, who is credited as a consultant and co-producer on the film, added that he trusted the filmmaking team to do the story justice for a new generation of audiences unfamiliar with the Astaires' stage act.

"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," Paul King said in a statement announcing the casting.

What happens next

Sony has not announced a production start date, a release window or a title for the film beyond calling it, for now, an untitled Fred Astaire project. Holland's rehearsal schedule and his other commitments, including further "Spider-Man" promotional work, make an exact shooting timeline hard to pin down from what has been disclosed so far. For Carpenter and Qualley, the roles mark a shift toward the kind of awards-season prestige filmmaking that has become a more common landing spot for pop stars and younger film actors alike, in a production that both the studio and the Astaire family are, for now, describing in almost identical terms: an attempt to put a sibling act that Hollywood never fully captured on screen for the first time.