Sabrina Carpenter Plays Ginger Rogers in an Adele Story

Sabrina Carpenter will play Ginger Rogers opposite Tom Holland in Sony’s untitled Fred Astaire film, a Paul King picture the director says is about Adele. Margaret Qualley will play Fred’s older sister and first partner, the dancer whose stage work, King said, left no footage behind.

The still-untitled movie, based on Kathleen Riley’s The Astaires: Fred & Adele, has been in the works since Holland attached himself in 2021. Carpenter is the name that moved the story, and she is not the partner King put in his first sentence.

Paul King Put the Sister at the Center

King, the British director of Paddington, Paddington 2 and Wonka, did not open his statement on Ginger Rogers. He opened it on Adele, the sibling who made Fred a star on Broadway and in London’s West End, then left the act in 1932.

I am thrilled and honored to have been entrusted with telling the story of Fred Astaire and his original dance partner, his big sister Adele, to the big screen. 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. 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, director, in a statement

Steven Levenson, the Dear Evan Hansen writer, co-wrote the script with King. Micah Schraft wrote an earlier draft. Riley is on the picture as a story and script consultant, which is how a theater historian’s 2012 study became a Sony musical with a pop star in the later reel.

Amy Pascal and Rachel O’Connor produce for Pascal Pictures, with Ben Holden and Josh Hyams for Lightbulb Pictures and Holland for his company Billy17. Fred’s daughter, Ava Astaire McKenzie, has given the project her public blessing, and her son Tyler McKenzie is a consultant and co-producer. The source text is Riley’s biography of Fred and Adele, which Oxford University Press billed as the first full account of their joint stage career, not a cradle-to-grave tour of the RKO years.

No Footage of Adele Dancing Survives

Adele Marie Austerlitz was born in Omaha on September 10, 1896, three years before her brother, and died in Scottsdale, Arizona, on January 25, 1981, at 84. They took the name Astaire, went on the vaudeville circuit as children, and reached Broadway in Over the Top on November 28, 1917. Riley, writing on the Oxford blog that accompanied her book, said that through their twenty-five-year theatrical career Adele was considered the more naturally gifted of the two, and the greater star.

There is no film record of their work together and Adele’s retirement from the stage almost immediately preceded Fred’s first tentative foray into Hollywood. As a consequence, Adele, one of the original pop icons of the twentieth century, has not achieved the lasting universal fame of her brother.

Kathleen Riley, theater historian, OUPblog

That gap is the job King assigned himself. Fred’s Hollywood dances exist in complete takes, full body in frame, because he insisted on it. Adele’s best work lived in rooms that emptied at 11 o’clock, and Riley found no film record of their work together as a stage act. Recordings of her singing survive. The dances Qualley will have to match do not.

TWO PARTNERS, TWO RECORDS

Critics who saw Adele in the 1920s reached for drinks and weather. George Jean Nathan called her presence “a dozen Florestan cocktails filtered through silk.” A London writer said she should have been dancing by glow-worm light. The Birmingham Dispatch wrote that the siblings’ humour sat in gesture, and that they sent an audience “twirling and striding and frolicking in glorious abandon.”

Their London smash Stop Flirting, a retitled For Goodness Sake, opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre on May 30, 1923, and ran 418 performances. The Prince of Wales came ten times. Back in New York they headlined Gershwin shows, then closed the partnership on the road.

ADELE ASTAIRE ON BROADWAY

• Over the Top: Broadway debut on November 28, 1917, a Shubert revue that put the siblings in New York at last.
• Lady, Be Good!: Opened December 1, 1924, ran through September 12, 1925, and gave them 330 performances of Gershwin, with Adele as Susie Trevor.
• Funny Face: Opened November 22, 1927, with Adele starring as Frankie, and closed June 23, 1928; a Paramount screen test went nowhere.
• The Band Wagon: Broadway run from June 3, 1931, to January 16, 1932, her last New York credit before the Chicago farewell.
• Chicago, March 5, 1932: Final bow with Fred in The Band Wagon, after which she married Lord Charles Cavendish and moved to Lismore Castle in Ireland.

Those titles sit on Adele Astaire’s Broadway credit list at the Internet Broadway Database. She turned down later offers to return. Fred never took another stage partner and went west, where Rogers, already a working actress, became the woman audiences still see when they hear his name.

Why Carpenter Is Playing Ginger Rogers

Sony needs a name the public already knows, and Carpenter is that name. She is a two-time Grammy winner who grew up as Maya Hart on Disney’s Girl Meets World, last appeared in a feature in 2022, and spent April folding an Old Hollywood look into her Coachella sets after co-directing the House Tour video with Qualley. Rogers is the partner a ticket buyer can picture. Adele is the one they cannot.

Carpenter’s film list is real and mostly pre-fame: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Orange Is the New Black, The Hate U Give, Tall Girl, the dance comedy Work It, Tall Girl 2, and Emergency. She picked up a Primetime Emmy nomination as a performer and executive producer on The Muppet Show. The louder response to the Sony news locked onto her as Rogers, not onto Qualley as the sister King named first, which is the commercial logic of putting a pop star in the famous later chapter of a sibling picture.

Qualley and Carpenter already share a frame. On April 6, 2026, they released House Tour, a clip they co-directed with Madelyn Cline along for the raid, a pink van on the curb and a stolen Grammy on the mantle. Carpenter then used the song as a centrepiece of that Old Hollywood Coachella run. The studio did not have to invent their chemistry. It was already on YouTube.

Classic-film loyalists have already flinched at a pop star in Rogers’s heels, and the worry is not mysterious. Rogers did with Fred, in ten pictures, the work that made “Astaire” a synonym for ease on camera. Carpenter’s dance credit of record is Work It, a cheerleading comedy, not a tap book. The production’s answer is the rest of the trio: Qualley came up through Fosse/Verdon, and Holland was Billy Elliot on the West End. The famous partner still has to be famous, or the sister movie does not get made at this scale.

Holland’s Rule Is No Doubles and One Shot

Holland told George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America in July 2026 that this is the film he plans to make next, after Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey. Brand New Day has taken more than $2 billion worldwide. The Odyssey has topped $1.72 billion. He is using that run to go back to the studio where he first learned to dance.

“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. He added a rule that will either define the picture or break a shooting day: “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.”

That is Astaire’s own grammar. He wanted the full body in the frame and the take unbroken, so nobody could wonder whose feet they were watching. Holland played Billy Elliot in the West End from 2008 to 2010, then, by his own later account, quit dancing, a decision he has called one of his biggest career regrets. He has also said that after Billy Elliot he told King not to worry, that he could dance, and that the first rehearsal left him petrified anyway.

King’s Paddington films took nearly $500 million together. Wonka put a pop-adjacent movie star, Timothée Chalamet, inside a musical that still had to land steps. The Astaire picture asks something colder. Fred’s numbers can be studied frame by frame. Adele’s have to be rebuilt from reviews, stills, and Riley’s notes, then danced by Qualley as if a camera had been in the Shaftesbury in 1923.

The Widow Objected and His Daughter Did Not

The Astaire name on the call sheet is not a united front. In November 2025, Fred’s widow, Robyn Astaire, wrote to Pascal that her husband “was explicit in his Will that he did not want his life story to be depicted on screen,” and that she fully respects those wishes. She warned the producers not to imply she had authorized a portrayal. Sony has kept going.

WHERE THE FAMILY SPLITS

• The widow: Robyn Astaire’s letter to Pascal treats a biopic as a breach of Fred’s stated wishes and objects to any claim that the estate signed off.
• The daughter: Ava Astaire McKenzie has publicly backed the film, and her son Tyler is inside it as a consultant and co-producer.
• The will itself: The letter is on the record as her account. The document has not been published, and the production is proceeding on Riley’s book rather than on Fred’s 1959 memoir.

Ava’s statement put the aunt beside the father. “I’m delighted to support this endeavor to celebrate the extraordinary careers and enduring legacy of my father and aunt, who were among the biggest musical stars of their era,” she said. “With Kathleen Riley’s seminal biography as its foundation and the creative team in place, the story of their partnership both on and off the stage is in the best care.” She added that under King, Levenson, Pascal, and Holland, she believes that legacy will reach a new generation.

So the person who danced is being played with the blessing of his child and over the protest of his widow. That is a narrower fight than a studio-versus-estate cartoon, and it will sit under every premiere still once cameras roll.

Qualley Already Had a Ginger Rogers Job

Qualley’s path into this film is a plot of its own. In December 2020, Amazon and Automatik set her as Rogers opposite Jamie Bell as Fred in a separate picture called Fred & Ginger, with Jonathan Entwistle directing. Bell, like Holland, had been Billy Elliot. That project later fell apart. Six years on, Qualley is Adele for Sony, and Carpenter has the Rogers part Qualley once held.

Before the September 25, 2026, announcement, the Adele shortlist had included Monica Barbaro, another classically trained dancer, with Chloe East also in the mix. Qualley won a role that asks for ballet line, comic timing, and a star’s appetite, because Adele was the one who pulled focus while Fred, in her nickname, was “Moaning Minnie,” worrying the steps. Qualley’s dance reel already includes Ann Reinking in Fosse/Verdon. Carpenter and Holland will be dancing toward a partner who has been in the room longer.

On October 1, 2026, Talia Ryder joined as June Allyson, the MGM dancer originally set to star opposite Astaire in Royal Wedding. Ryder came up in Broadway’s Matilda the Musical, danced in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, and appeared with Qualley in Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t. Her part is a tell. If Allyson is in the movie, the script does not stop in 1932 when Adele marries out. It follows Fred into the studio years, where Rogers is waiting and, in one case, a partner who was booked never made the picture.

Cameras Are Aimed at January

The film has no title and no release date. Production has been aimed at January 2027, a slot after Holland’s 2026 press tour and before the next franchise clock starts. That target has been public since early summer. Cast keeps being added, which is what a live prep period looks like, not a locked shoot.

HOW THE PICTURE GOT HERE

1. December 2020: Amazon sets Jamie Bell and Margaret Qualley as Fred and Ginger in a separate film that is later abandoned.
2. 2021: Holland confirms he will play Astaire for Sony, nearly five years before the Carpenter and Qualley announcement.
3. November 2025: Robyn Astaire writes to Amy Pascal objecting to a life-story film.
4. July 2026: Holland says the Astaire picture is next, that rehearsals have started, and that he wants no doubles and one-shot dances.
5. September 25, 2026: Qualley is set as Adele and Carpenter as Rogers, with King, Levenson, Riley, and Ava Astaire McKenzie on the record.
6. October 1, 2026: Talia Ryder joins as June Allyson.
7. January 2027: Planned start of principal photography, still untitled.

King has to invent Adele’s dancing from paper, then cut it against Fred’s, which already exists in the exact form Holland wants to copy. Carpenter has to walk into a partnership the world already knows, in a movie whose author and director keep pointing at the partner it forgot. If the January start holds, the first thing on camera will not be a top hat. It will be a sister the archive could not keep.