Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Tom Holland Steps Into Fred Astaire's Dancing Shoes

Some casting announcements feel like a dare. Tom Holland as Fred Astaire is one of them – and the more you sit with it, the more inevitable it looks. Sony’s long-developing Astaire biopic is now fully cast and moving toward production under director Paul King, with Holland as Astaire, Margaret Qualley as his sister Adele, Sabrina Carpenter as Ginger Rogers, and Talia Ryder, who joined the cast this month, as June Allyson.

The film is adapted from Kathleen Riley’s book The Astaires: Fred and Adele, and that subtitle is the key to the whole project. This is not a cradle-to-grave march through a famous man’s career. It is the story of a brother and sister act – Fred and Adele were a celebrated stage partnership on Broadway and in London’s West End long before Hollywood called – and of what happened when the act split and Fred had to reinvent himself for the screen, where he found his defining partner in Ginger Rogers.

Why Holland, why now

Holland’s route to this role runs through the stage, not the superhero gym. He played Billy Elliot in the West End as a boy, which means the dance training this part demands is in his bones, and he has said he plans to perform the film’s dance sequences himself. Qualley is a trained dancer too, and Ryder began on Broadway in Matilda before appearing in Spielberg’s West Side Story. King has cast people who can actually do the thing the film is about. That sounds obvious. It is rarer than it should be.

Paul King is the other inspired choice. The Paddington films and Wonka showed a director who treats whimsy with total sincerity and choreographs movement – of bears, of cameras, of whole musical numbers – with a light touch that never tips into syrup. He co-wrote the script with Steven Levenson, whose credits include Dear Evan Hansen and Fosse/Verdon, a series that understood dance as drama. Astaire’s family is behind the project as well: his wife Ava Astaire McKenzie supports the film, and her son Tyler McKenzie serves as a consultant and producer.

The Adele problem, handled honestly

King has pointed to the project’s most poignant challenge: no footage of Adele Astaire dancing survives. She was, by many accounts, the bigger star of the act in their stage years, and her work exists now only in reviews and memory. A film that restores her to the center of her brother’s story is doing genuine cultural repair, and Qualley – precise, funny, slightly feral in the best way – is exactly the actor to carry it.

Filming is expected to begin in early 2027, with no release date yet. Preview verdict: this is the classiest package Sony has assembled in years. In a season when the musical is roaring back – just look at the anticipation around Coco 2 and its return to the Land of the Dead – a film that treats dance as storytelling, cast with performers who can truly dance, feels perfectly timed. Holland grew up in musical theater. Astaire defined it on film. Some meetings are just meant to happen.

A director who understands joy as a craft

It is worth pausing on Paul King once more, because biopics about performers usually fail in the same place: they admire the legend and forget the work. King’s films never forget the work. Paddington’s marmalade sandwiches and Wonka’s chocolate are treated with an engineer’s respect for process, and Astaire’s genius was process – rehearsals counted in weeks for routines that look effortless for three minutes. A King film about Astaire will show the sweat inside the elegance, and with performers who can dance the steps themselves rather than being doubled into invisibility, the camera can afford to do what Astaire always demanded: pull back, hold still, and let the whole body tell the story. That single choice, if King makes it, would honor Astaire more than any speech in the script.

One last delight in the package: the June Allyson role. Allyson was set to star opposite Astaire in Royal Wedding before the part went elsewhere, one of Hollywood’s great what-ifs, and building her into the story as played by Ryder gives the film a graceful subplot about the partners history almost made. It is the kind of detail that signals a script written by people who love this world rather than merely licensing it. Between that, the Adele restoration at the story’s center, and a cast that can genuinely dance, the Astaire biopic has quietly become the prestige musical to beat. Coco 2 may own 2029’s emotions, but this film owns our curiosity today.