“I’m relieved, I’m exhausted, and I’m triumphant,” the SAG-AFTRA president says, less than 24 hours after notching her union what she calls a historic deal.
We all cried,” says Fran Drescher, recalling the moment that SAG-AFTRA reached a tentative agreement to end the actors strike on Wednesday night. “It was such a relief and a release. I felt like one of those tennis stars, like Djokovic when he won the US Open and fell to his knees and wept on the court.”
For the last 30 years, Drescher was best known for her role as sweetly brash working woman Fran Fine in the classic 1990s sitcom The Nanny. That changed on July 13, when Drescher, in her role as SAG-AFTRA president, announced that the actors would be going on strike. In her familiar, adenoidal Queens accent, she hurled scathing invective at the entertainment studios and streamers represented by the AMPTP—“a greedy entity” that she deemed to be “on the wrong side of history.”
Suddenly, she had transformed herself into a Hollywood labor leader—someone who, alongside SAG national executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, would hold out for 118 days to get the guild’s membership a deal that might help actors survive the chaos and industry contraction of the next few years. Over the course of the strike, she made waves by calling out Disney chief Bob Iger, and she provoked gossip by reading out Buddhist quotes and bringing a heart-shaped plush toy into negotiations.
The strike officially ended in the wee hours of Thursday morning, though SAG-AFTRA’s members have not yet ratified the contract. Drescher says she is confident that her guild negotiated “an amazing deal” that includes a new mechanism for streaming compensation, increases actors minimum pay, and puts guardrails around the use of AI. Sounding a little hoarse after all the excitement, Drescher talks to Vanity Fair about taking on Hollywood’s CEOs, rallying A-list celebs, reading Buddhist words of wisdom in the negotiation room, and getting a deal done.
Vanity Fair: I imagine it has been a pretty exhausting 24 hours.
Fran Drescher: It’s everything. I’m relieved, I’m exhausted, and I’m triumphant. The stress has been lifted off me. I don’t know how much more any of us in the negotiating committee could have taken. And the fact that we got a historic deal just makes it that much more delicious
Definitely putting barricades around AI. That was very important because we’re at a historic moment with all of this technology, and if we didn’t get it in a contract that protected our members right here right now, it was going to get so far ahead of us that it would be just outside of our grasp. Now we got our full proposal, and we’re going to meet with the AMPTP members twice a year to keep our finger on the pulse of how it is advancing.
What didn’t you get that frustrates you?
For the first time, after fighting for 20 years, we got performance capture. Which is a great thing, but they didn’t want to talk about facial or motion capture. That has to get in there, and it will next time. We needed desperately to get revenue for streaming platforms and we got that. Was it what I had imagined way back when? No, it’s something else…a bonus that goes into a fund, and then we can figure out how it gets distributed. We also spent a lot of time talking about self-tapes for auditions and interviews, which monopolized the casting industry during Covid. There were no real regulations—everybody just told actors that they had to do them if they wanted the privilege of trying out for the job, so that had to be regulated. Now, did we get everything we wanted with that? No. Did we get some really good things? Yes. Are we already making a list of what’s gonna come next? Of course!
There’s a lot of being grown-up and realizing that you’re not going to get everything. But there were moments when they had to fully understand that there were things we would not give up. I told them to their faces: We are already on strike, so it’s up to you. And in the eleventh hour, they came in with the [streaming bonus] fund, and they came in with the last important piece of the AI agreement.
When I interviewed you two years ago, you said, “I’m not going to argue the point that we need an improved contract. I’m going to argue that you need to be a better person, that you need to be able to live with yourself.” Did that happen?
That was that part of our conversation, which is probably not normally part of union negotiations. By reading Buddhist wisdom, I hope that I tap into something that may make them realize that this is not a black-and-white thing. There are people that are counting on all of us to make their livelihood, and to make their lives more livable. That’s the responsibility of the employer as much as the union leader, and I want them to be the best human being they can be. I want this negotiation and this strike to begin this conversation of what is success, and to redefine it so every decision we make in business includes empathy and spirituality and respect.
I can imagine how well that went over. Do you think your opponents underestimated you?
They definitely underestimated me for a number of reasons. I think that past negotiators were not as bullish as the leadership of myself and Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, and maybe they were expecting that we would be intimidated by the usual aggressive power tactics that have gotten these people to the places that they are. But when that didn’t work, and when trying to discredit me as a woman leader didn’t work, it became, I think, a learning curve for them. Like, we have to play this differently, because we’re losing.
A lot of buzz circulated around about you bringing a “doll” to negotiations.
[She holds up the infamous white heart-shaped plushie.] An 11-year-old girl gave this to me before the first time I was going into the room with the CEOs. I started taking it out and putting it on the desk. I sat right opposite Bob Iger, so this sat in front of me on the desk facing him. So what if it’s not what you’re used to? Then it’s time for you to soften your act and get used to it, because there’s no downside to looking at this little thing. Doesn’t it put a smile on your face?
Maybe it was unnerving for them.
Of course it was, but that wasn’t my intention. They had to get used to me and a new style of negotiation. And if all they did was look at their watch and think, ”Oy, now she’s gonna read a Buddhist offering,” so be it. Then they still have a lot more growing to do as human beings, and that’s their journey. But I’m on my journey….
I’ve been through a lot. I’ve had very low lows in my life. And I knew that I had what it took to do this, because everything about my life has led to this one defining moment. I have a level of empathy that gives me the ability to keep looking at what’s coming at me and communicate.
You’ve got Buddhism and you’ve got humor.
There were several times where we all broke into spontaneous laughter. It had nothing to do with the negotiation, and it was a wonderful reprieve. Even for the CEOs.
There were some quotes flying outside the negotiation room early on from people like Ted Sarandos and Bob Iger. (The latter said at the Sun Valley conference that the guilds weren’t being “realistic” in their demands.) Did they make you angry?
That video that Bob did—it wasn’t his intention to have it backfire on him. He didn’t think, and nobody protected him. When you live the life that he gets to live because of his position and power, you become desensitized to what the optics are, and how the average worker is going to perceive something. It was actually the press that told me they were at the billionaire’s camp. It was the press that told me that there was a line up of private jets that they all arrived on. So that was an opportunity to be leveraged, because then he says we are being unrealistic? It had to be called out. But I’m sure that if I wasn’t in opposition to him through this and I just met him at a cocktail party, I would think that he was a very lovely and charming man.
You probably will meet him at a cocktail party at some point soon.
As I run into each of them, I intend to give them a hug. You know, it’s business, it’s not personal.
Does it frustrate you to think about how long it took to get to a deal done, when so many in the industry were struggling without work?
If we had continued working together as we asked [AMPTP] to do, we would have resolved it in two or three weeks. But they gave us the silent treatment for a very long time and didn’t really come back to our table until October. So you know, when you talk about how long it took— I think they were trying to smoke us out. They might not admit that, but they even left the table in the middle of the negotiations when we offered them a counter, and their response was: We’re out of here. So the protracted time was on them. If we needed a couple of extra days, it was because we were really figuring out their counter, not because we said: we’re just going to ignore you until we’re ready to come back.
Unions like IATSE and Teamsters supported the actors and writers strikes, and some of those members are worried that they won’t have leverage for their own negotiations next year, because the town is so burned out. Have you discussed ways to repay the favor?
A lot of people were hit with extremely hard times, which weighed very heavily on me and the negotiating committee. What nobody really realized was that what we were fighting for [will help] the leadership of those unions that have subsequent contracts to negotiate. For example, if we didn’t get the A.I. restrictions, those people were going to suffer as much as we were going to suffer, because in a virtual world you don’t need hair and makeup. You don’t need sets built. You don’t need drivers. A lot of those [jobs] are covered by Teamsters and IATSE. So we are tied at the hip and everybody will reap the benefit of this contract.
You also had the attention of A-list actors.
George Clooney said to me, “I would have bet my house —and lost—that you wouldn’t have gotten the deal that you got.” He’s been very helpful, and very generous, with getting the big A-listers to donate to the foundation at the beginning, and getting A-listers to agree to raise their dues and lift the caps. We had support from everyone—Ben [Affleck] and Jen [Lopez], Ryan Reynolds and Bradley Cooper, Tyler Perry and Emma Stone, Laura Dern and Kerry Washington, Meryl Streep, Bobby De Niro and Scarlett Johansson.
They’re heavyweights, but every one of them remembers when they got their first SAG card. Every one of them remembers how important that residual check was when it came in the mail, because then they could pay their rent. You don’t forget that when you’re an actor. You’re part of a community, no matter how big you get. … And they each did a lot of back channeling for us. When we needed that last piece of AI, I started hitting the texts and saying, “You call them, because this is not going to move forward without it.”
So they were putting pressure on the CEOs?
Yes! And Joely Fisher, our national secretary/treasurer, was doing her own back channeling and putting pressure on them to get this thing closed already.
What did you do yesterday to celebrate?
I went out to dinner with my gay ex-husband. At the beginning of the day, I told him, “I wish you were here so you could give me a hug.” I didn’t think anything of it, but he surprised me and showed up to give me that hug. We went out to dinner, and the most poetic thing happened: I had told them the strike was over. When we went to pay the bill, the hostess said, “Yours will be the last 25% discount for the strike, because you ended it.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
