I have been following the Fred Astaire biopic starring Tom Holland for five years now, through announcements, changes, long stretches of silence and the inevitable question of when — or even whether — the movie would ever actually happen. No update, however, has felt as important as this one. Margaret Qualley will play Adele Astaire, while Sabrina Carpenter will portray Ginger Rogers. At last, we know who will stand on either side of Fred Astaire, and, more importantly, we are beginning to understand what kind of film director Paul King intends to make.

Because this should never have been simply a biopic about one of the greatest dancers cinema has ever known. Fred Astaire had two defining partnerships that divided his artistic life almost perfectly between before and after Hollywood. The first was with his older sister Adele, with whom he danced from childhood and became a star on Broadway and in the West End long before anyone could have imagined Top Hat, Swing Time or Ginger Rogers. The second, of course, was Ginger herself, with whom he would make ten films and create some of the most indestructible images in the history of the American musical.

Margaret Qualley’s casting is especially interesting because Adele Astaire now risks being remembered simply as “Fred’s sister.” At the time, she was far more than that. The Astaires were a team, and Adele had such a powerful stage personality that contemporary critics frequently singled out her magnetism. An essay from the Library of Congress about the siblings’ 1926 recording of Fascinating Rhythm describes Adele as a naturally graceful and comic dancer, but suggests that even greater than her dancing was the force of her personality. Fred was the more restrained, disciplined and inventive partner; Adele was the explosion.

That seems to be exactly where Paul King has found the heart of the film. The screenplay, written by King and Steven Levenson, is based on Kathleen Riley’s The Astaires: Fred & Adele, with Riley also serving as a consultant on the project. And King himself has pointed to what may be the greatest cinematic challenge of this story: Fred left his dancing preserved forever on film, while no surviving footage exists of Adele dancing. Any Adele we see on screen will therefore have to be reconstructed from photographs, accounts, reviews and written records.

That completely changes the perspective of the movie. Before Fred Astaire became the seemingly weightless man who moved across ballrooms, walls and staircases on film, there were Fred and Adele. They were stars in New York and London, worked with George and Ira Gershwin and helped define the musical theatre of the 1920s. When Adele left the stage in 1932 after getting married, Fred had to discover who he was artistically without the partner with whom he had spent practically his entire life. Hollywood came later.

And then came Ginger Rogers. Sabrina Carpenter will be responsible for the part of the story we recognize immediately. Fred and Ginger first danced together on screen in Flying Down to Rio in 1933, made nine films together throughout the 1930s, and reunited one final time for The Barkleys of Broadway in 1949. They did not merely create a dancing partnership; they created a way of filming one. Astaire wanted the entire body visible, as few cuts as possible, and a camera that allowed the dancing to happen in front of it. On screen, the two of them transformed brutal technique into effortlessness. It looked easy precisely because it wasn’t.

That is why announcing both actresses at the same time is so revealing. Adele represents Fred before Fred Astaire. Ginger represents the Fred Astaire cinema made immortal. One helped shape his language; the other allowed that language to reach the screen and become eternal. Putting Margaret Qualley and Sabrina Carpenter around Tom Holland suggests that King is interested in more than simply moving chronologically through the life of a star. He seems to want to show how an artist changes when he loses one partnership and finds another.

It is also no small detail that Margaret Qualley was chosen to play Adele. Qualley has a real background in dance, something her work has explored more than once, but she will face a curious difficulty here: she cannot simply “imitate” Adele because there is no Adele to imitate. She will have to build a dancer we know was extraordinary without the reassurance of surviving footage telling her exactly how that woman moved. Perhaps that absence is precisely what will allow the film to give Adele back a place that film history ultimately took away from her.

Sabrina Carpenter faces almost the opposite problem. Ginger Rogers exists everywhere before our eyes. Every step can be watched again, compared and analyzed. And any actress who agrees to play her must also confront that old misconception that Ginger merely served as a frame for Astaire, when their chemistry worked precisely because she brought resistance, humor, sensuality and personality to him. Their dancing was also acting.

There is also an irony impossible to ignore. Fred Astaire was famously opposed to the idea of seeing his life turned into a movie and made it clear that he did not want his story portrayed on screen. Decades later, the biopic is moving forward with the support of his daughter Ava Astaire McKenzie, while his grandson Tyler McKenzie is involved as a consultant and co-producer. Ava has said she believes the story of her father’s partnership with Adele is in good hands with the team assembled for the project.

Tom Holland announced in 2021 that he would play Astaire. Since then, enough years have passed for it to be reasonable to wonder whether the project might become one of those biopics permanently stuck “in development.” Now, with Paul King directing, a defined screenplay, the family involved and, finally, Adele and Ginger cast, the film feels much more real. Holland recently said filming is expected to begin in early 2027.

It has taken five years, but perhaps we can finally stop talking about “the Fred Astaire movie with Tom Holland” and start talking about something far more interesting: the film about Fred, Adele and Ginger, and the two partnerships that built Fred Astaire.