Qualley Takes Adele Astaire, the Partner With No Film

Margaret Qualley and Sabrina Carpenter will play Adele Astaire and Ginger Rogers opposite Tom Holland in Sony’s Fred Astaire biopic. Paul King directs the still untitled film, and he has already named the hole at its centre: no footage of Adele dancing survives.

That is the job Qualley is being hired to do. Carpenter walks into a part that already lives on film.

Paul King Says the Film Is About Adele First

On 25 September 2026, Sony Pictures confirmed Qualley as Adele and Carpenter as Ginger, with Holland as Fred. Amy Pascal produces. King is directing from a script he wrote with Steven Levenson, the writer of Dear Evan Hansen, drawn from Kathleen Riley’s book The Astaires: Fred & Adele. Riley is also a script and story adviser.

King said he was honoured to bring Fred and his original partner, his big sister Adele, to the screen. Fred left a lasting record of dance on film, most famously with Ginger Rogers, he said, while Adele’s work has been lost to history, and no footage of her dancing survives. He added that he could not imagine that task without Holland, Qualley and Carpenter.

Carpenter is the name that moves the story in public. Qualley has the part that has to be built from paper, stills and a singing test.

A 27-Year Act With Almost Nothing on Film

Before Hollywood turned Fred Astaire into a movie star, he spent 27 years on the road and on stage with Adele. She was eight and he was five when the act began. Through the 1920s she was widely treated as the bigger draw, the comic spark beside a brother who rehearsed as if the night might expose him.

Their Broadway run included Gershwin’s Lady, Be Good!, which played 330 performances in New York, then Funny Face in 1927 and The Band Wagon in 1931. On 5 March 1932, after a last show in The Band Wagon, Adele left the stage to marry Lord Charles Cavendish, second son of the 9th Duke of Devonshire, and moved to Lismore Castle in Ireland. Fred went on alone, first in Gay Divorce on stage, then to the camera.

THE ADELE YEARS

1. About 1905: Adele, eight, and Fred, five, begin the sibling act on small-time vaudeville bills.
2. 1917: They reach Broadway in Over the Top.
3. 1924: Lady, Be Good! makes them Gershwin-era headliners, with 330 New York shows.
4. 1927: Adele introduces “’S Wonderful” in Funny Face.
5. 5 March 1932: After The Band Wagon, she retires at the end of the 27-year partnership.
6. 1936: David O. Selznick films her in a Culver City screen test, singing and acting, not dancing.

Riley writes that, as far as anyone can tell, no film exists of Fred and Adele dancing together on stage. A 1930 short, Backstage on Broadway, catches a few seconds of them stepping out of the wings, shot from the side and partly blocked by Marilyn Miller. It is a walk-on, not a number.

In May 2024 the George Eastman Museum put online only known Adele acting footage, a 1936 Selznick test shot at the old Pathé studio. She sings “’S Wonderful,” a song she had introduced on stage. Peter Bagrov, senior curator of the museum’s Moving Image Department, said Adele was the star of the family in the 1920s, and that until that reel there had been no way to see her act and sing. King’s point still stands. The test is voice and presence. The dances she built with Fred are still missing.

Margaret Qualley Already Left Ballet Once

Qualley is a Golden Globe nominee for work in Maid, The Substance and Love of Your Life. The Adele role leans on a life she already walked away from. She trained as a ballet dancer from childhood, left home at 14 for the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and spent summers in New York, including time around American Ballet Theatre. She danced six to eight hours a day, then took extra open classes on Sundays.

At 16 she was offered an apprenticeship and was ready to drop out of school for a company job. She quit instead. Perfection had swallowed the pleasure, she has said, and acting looked like a craft that could use the mess. She later played Ann Reinking in FX’s Fosse/Verdon, a part that put Broadway choreography back on her body and earned her an Emmy nomination. In 2025 she opened the Oscars with a Bond dance number.

WHAT QUALLEY BRINGS TO ADELE

• Early training: Ballet from childhood, then boarding study at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts from age 14.
• Company track: American Ballet Theatre summer work and an apprenticeship offer she turned down at 16.
• Screen dance: Ann Reinking in Fosse/Verdon, with an Emmy nomination attached to that turn.
• Live test: A Bond medley at the 2025 Oscars, in front of the industry that will now watch her rebuild Adele.

Adele was not a ballet technician. She was a vaudeville and Broadway comic who made a brother look free. Qualley’s record is still the closest thing the film has to a living instrument for a dancer who left no reel. If the sibling numbers fail, the movie King described fails with them.

What Ginger Rogers Gives Carpenter to Copy

Carpenter, a Grammy winner, will play Ginger Rogers. Rogers and Astaire appeared as ten films as dance partners, a Guinness World Records mark that still stands. Nine of those pictures came from RKO between 1933 and 1939. The tenth, The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), was their only film in colour, made at MGM after a ten-year gap, when Rogers stepped in after Judy Garland fell ill.

That is a library Qualley does not get. Carpenter can watch Top Hat (1935), The Gay Divorcee (1934) and Swing Time (1936) until the camera angles are in her bones. She also has pop-stage miles behind her. The Short n’ Sweet Tour ran 70 shows from 23 September 2024 to 23 November 2025. Before the records, she had already made a dance picture: Netflix’s Work It, released 7 August 2020, 93 minutes, in which she played Quinn Ackerman, a straight-A senior who could not dance and had to learn in public.

TWO PARTNERS, TWO ARCHIVES

Rogers was never Adele’s replacement in Fred’s own accounting. He learned how to present a woman beside his sister, then spent a career trying not to be trapped in one pairing. Carpenter’s Ginger will be judged against a record that already exists. Qualley’s Adele will be judged against reviews, stills and Riley’s pages.

Holland Wants the Dances Shot in One Take

Holland has been attached as Astaire since 2021. He spent the summer of 2026 in Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey, the two highest-grossing films of the year, then went back to the studio. “I’m diving back into the dance studio,” he said on Good Morning America.

He started on the London stage, playing the title role in Billy Elliot the Musical on the West End from 2008 to 2010, and he has said he wants to do the Astaire dances himself. “I have a desire to use no doubles, to do all of the dancing, to shoot those dances in one shot.” That is how Astaire worked on camera, full-body, few cuts, the feet as the edit.

Holland is also a producer through his Billy 17 banner, with Pascal and Rachel O’Connor for Pascal Pictures, and Ben Holden and Josh Hyams for Lightbulb Pictures. Harry Holland and Will South are among the executive producers. A one-take rule turns rehearsal into the movie. It also ties Qualley and Carpenter to the same physical standard, because a single shot cannot hide a partner who is marking the steps.

Fred’s Daughter Backs a Story His Widow Opposed

Ava Astaire McKenzie, Fred’s daughter, endorsed the project as the casting became public. Her son, Tyler McKenzie, is a consultant and co-producer. She pointed to Riley’s book as the ground under the script.

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. 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.

Ava Astaire McKenzie, Fred Astaire’s daughter

She added that under King, Levenson, Pascal and Holland, the legacy would reach a new generation. That blessing sits beside an older family fight. In a letter to Pascal, Robyn Astaire, Fred’s widow, said she had not authorised any portrayal of her husband, and that Fred “was explicit in his Will that he did not want his life story to be depicted on screen.” She said she respects those wishes and warned against any claim that she had signed off.

Sony has not treated that letter as a stop. The studio named Qualley and Carpenter this week and is pointing toward a start of filming in January 2027. Riley’s study of the Astaires, 272 pages with 50 photographs, is the text the family branch that is on the film says it trusts. Adele’s later life is in those pages too: Cavendish died in 1944, at 38, after years of drink; the couple’s children were stillborn or lost; during the war she volunteered in London and signed letters “Adele Astaire, Fred’s sister.”

Cameras Are Due in January 2027

Fred Astaire made more than 30 film musicals across a seven-decade career. The public memory still starts with Rogers. King’s brief starts earlier, with a sister who left the act in 1932 and left almost no moving image of the work that made her famous.

Filming is due in January 2027. The film still has no title. Qualley will have to put Adele on her feet without a dance reel to steal from, and Carpenter will have to stand next to ten musicals that already did the joke, the tap and the close-up. Holland’s one-shot rule means none of them can hide in the cut.