NEED TO KNOW
Sabrina Carpenter is re-entering her acting era.
According to multiple media outlets, the 26-year-old pop star is set to star in and produce her first major studio feature with a new musical inspired by Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Variety confirmed that Lorene Scafaria, director of HBO’s I Love L.A., is on board to write and direct the musical at Universal Pictures. Marc Platt — the producer behind both the stage and screen versions of Wicked — will also be joining Carpenter in producing the Alice in Wonderland-inspired film through his Universal-backed Marc Platt Productions alongside Leslie Morgenstein and Elysa Koplovitz Dutton of Alloy Entertainment.
While Netflix had previously announced a feature pitch for a re-imagining of Alice in Wonderland in 2020 that was to be penned by Ross Evans, the project never came to pass.
Now, the musical will join the handful of movie adaptations, including Disney’s 1951 animated film and Tim Burton’s 2010 live-action adaptation, which follows the Victorian-era story of a girl who falls down a rabbit hole and ends up in a fantastical world of singing flowers and hookah-smoking caterpillars.
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While the Grammy winner has recently been busy with her ongoing Short ‘n Sweet tour and the release of her seventh studio album, Man’s Best Friend, the former child star began her acting career back in 2011, when she made an appearance in NBC’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit at only 11 years old.
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In the following years, she was cast in several projects — including the TV movie Gulliver Quinn, Fox’s Goodwin Games, and Disney’s Sofia the First — before landing her breakout role in 2013 playing Maya Hart in the Disney Channel’s Boy Meets World reboot.
“That was my world and that was my everything, and I was so proud to be a part of it and everything that it stood for,” Carpenter told Teen Vogue of Girl Meets World in 2020. “I definitely would have done some things different had I been doing it now, but I think the beauty of the show was that we really were at the age that we were playing and we were coming into ourselves as we were playing characters that were coming into themselves.”
Since the show ended in 2017, Carpenter has moved into more serious roles in 2018’s The Hate U Give and 2019’s The Short History of the Long Road, as well as teen rom-coms like Tall Girl and Disney’s Clouds. Most recently, she’s been largely focused on her music, having earned six Grammy nominations for Man’s Best Friend — including Album of the Year and Record of the Year, and Song of the Year — just last week.
