To this day, whenever I am in Flushing, Queens, I can’t help but hum the tune of The Nanny’s theme song: “She had style, she had flair, she was there!” Well, 30 years after the iconic sitcom first aired, Fran Drescher is back in the spotlight. She’s once again a caretaker, but this time she’s responsible for the thousands of striking members of the SAG-AFTRA union, of which she is president. One week into the strike (the first time both SAG-AFTRA and the WGA have been on strike together since 1960), Drescher joined us via Zoom—and let me tell you, she still has style and flair!
In addition to discussing fair compensation, corporate greed, and the dangers facing SAG members, Drescher told us about being a Vogue subscriber, her favorite white sequin Bob Mackie gown from The Nanny, and her go-to conditioner (it’s for blondes!). She called in from her home in Malibu, and throughout the interview her husky mix, Angel Grace, poked her head into the screen. As the song goes, who would have guessed that the girl we’ve described, was just exactly what the doctor prescribed? Without further ado, the flashy girl from Flushing herself.
Note: The following transcript was generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
Chloe Malle: This is The Run-Through. I’m Chloe Malle.
Chioma Nnadi: And I m Chioma Nnadi. And today—a bonus episode for you. Unless you ve been living under a rock, you ll know that SAG-AFTRA is on strike and TV and film production is, well, it s basically shut down. The strike, of course, affects not just actors and performers, it has a ripple effect on so many people in the industry, from makeup artists to stylists.
Chloe Malle: And we re certainly thinking about it at Vogue. I mean, some of the bread and butter of the magazine, and of course this podcast, is not just fashion, but talking to Hollywood stars about their new projects, celebrity style, which we won t get a lot of on the red carpet these days. So it will be interesting to see how the strike affects us as well, since we re very selfish over here.
Chioma Nnadi: Totally. And we want to learn more about it. So we ve asked Fran Drescher, the one and only actor, producer, writer, and president of SAG-AFTRA to come and talk to us about it.
Chloe Malle: Obviously Fran Drescher is a woman after my own heart because when we got on the Zoom, she was snuggling with her husky mix, Angel Grace, who she very touchingly said she rescued, but who really rescued her, so she had me like putty in her hand from then on.
[FADE IN]
Fran Drescher: …we found her at Rock and Rescue Animal Adoption Center. Is that where we found you? Oh. And weren t we lucky? See, it was so meant to be. It was so meant to be.
Chloe Malle: Has she been on the picket line with you?
Fran Drescher: Not yet. It s a little warm, but I, she may. She may, eventually. Yeah.
Chloe Malle: Aww.
Fran Drescher: But she s been here for all of the video stuff.
Chioma Nnadi: What are you wearing to strike in?
Fran Drescher: That s interesting because, you know, when I made that speech that kind of reverberated around the world, I was wearing the strike, uh, T-shirt with a sweatshirt over it that, um, it was just from my personal wardrobe and that kind of became my uniform for the first few days. And then the publicist said, you know, “At some point I think you have to transition into your regular clothes.” [Talks to dog] I love this dog so much. I can t even.
Chloe Malle: Oh, I love this dog!
Fran Drescher: [Talks to dog] Oh mamama. Ah papapa. Oh mamama. Love you. Yeah. You re a good girl. Mama loves you.
Chloe Malle: Oh my God. She should be the face of the strike.
Fran Drescher: Right?
Chioma Nnadi: We need a T-shirt with her face on it.
Fran Drescher: Yeah she’s got a brown eye and a blue eye. Yeah, she s got David Bowie eyes.
Chloe Malle: Awwww.
Fran Drescher: Anyway, and then the publicist said, you know, “I think that you need to…,” I was doing a lot of, you know, press, like national morning news shows and things like that, and she suggested that I start transitioning into regular like business attire or my regular clothes, but that was why I wanted to have the brands coming forward anyway with the button. So, um, that s where we re at with this. I don t have a uniform. I kind of dress for the occasion.
Chloe Malle: We like that.
Fran Drescher: But the T-shirts are great. The baseball caps are great. I just said this morning, whoever ordered this stuff, you know, did a good job.
Chloe Malle: We do wanna talk about the strike, but I, as a big Nanny fan, I was curious if you have a favorite Fran Fine walking-down-the-staircase outfit and do you still have those in your closet?
Fran Drescher: Well I would have to say that one of my favorites was that gorgeous, uh, white sequin Bob Mackie gown where my hair was up and I kind of tried to look like Audrey Hepburn and we were going to a Barbra Streisand concert, but, Fran being Fran, she let C.C. go instead, and she…
Chloe Malle: Aww. Well that s a good one.
Fran Drescher: Oh, that was a great one. But there were so many, but you know, I mean, I ve, I at the time, a lot of the designers that are very established now were just establishing themselves and so, you know, Dolce Gabbana and Moschino were brands that I wore all the time. And as you probably know, I m the brand ambassador for Dolce Gabbana now, and I was just in Puglia where they were promoting their new collection. And Dolce said to me that his boyfriend Gui, they watch The Nanny to this day. And, and Dolce says, “That s ours. That s ours. That s ours. That s ours,” as they re watching it.
Chloe Malle: Oh my God, that s so funny.
Fran Drescher: So that made me happy to think that, that they not only still watch and enjoy it, but that he s also picking out his stuff.
Chloe Malle: Oh, that is hysterical.
Chioma Nnadi: Well, speaking of Dolce, I love that you set the record straight and said you were working. Were you surprised that people were outraged or were you surprised at the criticism?
Fran Drescher: You know, I have a keen understanding of the way things work and I know that I m clickbait.
Chioma Nnadi: Right.
Fran Drescher: So there are people that may want to attack me and they re gonna use it. And then there s, uh, the publications that benefit from any conflict that they, I don t even think that they care one way or the other, as long as there s a lot of comments coming. So that s, you know, the name of the game. Having said that, you know, I had only met Kim Kardashian seconds before that photo was taken. And we took the picture, but we re both brand ambassadors and we re both there working, and it s a lot of work to do that. I was in hair and makeup every day for three hours.
Chloe Malle: Oh my gosh.
Fran Drescher: Walking on cobblestones, in the heat, in heels. It s part of the job and I m happy to do it, but don t think for a minute that I wasn t working and then I d leave that event and because of the nine-hour time difference, I would start my day with the union.
Chloe Malle: Wow. And Fran, for people who don t know, can you just tell us what, what people were criticizing you of? Was it that they thought you were gallivanting across Puglia and they didn t really understand the reality?
Fran Drescher: Yes, yes. It looked like I was having a lot of fun partying it up with Kim Kardashian when both of us probably would ve much rather have been home, undressed in our homes in Malibu. I have an ocean view and I feel very blessed, very blessed, and in gratitude every single day that I m able to see that kind of wilderness right outside my back door. And it gives me a lot of peace because I do have a lot of stress and pressure in my life. And, uh, one of which is, you know, this job as president, a position that I do not get paid for, and what happened last week when I made that impassioned speech on behalf of our members, [it] reverberated to workers around the world, um, who are being marginalized and dishonored and disrespected by greedy employers, but also are in jeopardy of being replaced by AI and, uh, it is a very big conversation.
Chloe Malle: Did you think that you were gonna be able to find a solution when you went into talks? What was your inkling about how things were gonna go?
Fran Drescher: When I went into talks, I was optimistic. To me, it seems like a no-brainer. You, uh, introduce a whole new business model, you know—
Chloe Malle: Meaning streaming.
Fran Drescher: Yes. You have to restructure the contract to complement the new business model, you need a new contract. I also, in the beginning, it seemed like they started to work with peripheral issues and it felt like we were making headway, so I felt encouraged by that. But then as we started to move more into core issues that were actually deal-breaker issues, we were stonewalled, and ultimately, we were given very little back as counterproposals. We were trying to avert a strike. Nobody wants a strike, and believe me, it s going to impact my members a lot sooner than these CEOs that are making five digits a day.
Chloe Malle: Right.
Fran Drescher: High five digits a day. And I think that the bigger story here, we have to get out on top. We must reposition ourselves. These people cannot continue to act like we are serfs, you know, in medieval times. We are the foundation of their entire business model. Without us, they don t exist. I was looking at them from across the negotiating table and thinking to myself, you know, these people are on the wrong side of history. Their whole job is to screw us, and they re systematically accomplishing that, screwing us out of the economics to be able to make a living in this field, and we can t tolerate that. We were on the picket line here in California. And all the shade trees, they decided, wow, this is a good time to trim them all back.
Chloe Malle: Oh wow.
Chioma Nnadi: I found that quite…when I heard that, I was really shocked.
Fran Drescher: And we filed, uh, a complaint about that because you are interfering with a strike process, which is our legal right. But that just exemplifies how they think.
Chloe Malle: As a leader, how do you keep morale up as you keep going? I spoke to a friend who s in the WGA this morning and she was like, “Oh, it s so hot. I m getting so tired on this picket line.” And I think people are just gonna get to a point where it s hard to remember why you re going through all of this.
Fran Drescher: Well, I don t know if it s hard to remember actually.
Chloe Malle: Okay.
Fran Drescher: While the CEOs are producing dystopian world entertainment, these people are actually living it boots on the ground, so, I don t think they re forgetting why they re striking, but they may kvetch about the fact that it s hot. And that s true. And I do have a lot of heavy-lifting to make sure that we all stay focused and keep our eye on the prize and understand who the enemy is. And it s not each other.
Chioma Nnadi: I m curious to know, I know you ve been president of SAG for two years.
Fran Drescher: Two years.
Chioma Nnadi: What made you decide to go to do this—to run, and could you have anticipated such a historical moment? Because obviously the writers and actors haven t been on strike since 1960. Did you imagine that in your tenure this would happen or what motivated you to take, to take on, to run?
Fran Drescher: Well, I was solicited. Rosie O Donnell had recommended me as the smartest woman she knows and most qualified for the position. When they approached me, you know, I had to really think long and hard about it because I don t do anything halfway. I go into it and I go into it full throttle. So I knew it was gonna be time-consuming. I knew it was gonna take me away from paying work. And, uh, I also knew that I would be very good at it and good for the union. And I thought that it would be an expression of all of my life experience and accomplishments in one defining moment. And I think that, what I was doing in these first two years was preparing us for this. I m the daughter of a systems analyst. He made a career out of it. I just use it in my life. I see systems where other people don t. Now, I didn t know we were gonna go on strike, even though other people who have a lot, many, many decades, years of experience working in service to this union said, you know, I mean, this feels like we re gonna have to strike.
Chloe Malle: You were sort of marshaled into war against your will right now. You re, I feel like you re on, you re fighting now. You re like the Zelenskyy of Hollywood.
[LAUGHTER]
Fran Drescher: Yes. Thank you. Uh, yes, absolutely. I mean, you know, I m a girl from Queens. I m no pushover. If you are not going to do the right thing, then we re going to have to make you do the right thing. We need somebody with courage and character to walk into those boardrooms and say, “This is not the way we should be running our company. That s the wrong way to run a business.” And it s a malignancy that s all over the place, and that is fueled by blinding greed. There s nothing wrong with making money, but when you do it at the expense of all things of true value, it s a sickness. I see in Santa Monica, here in Southern California, those little robot boxes rolling around the street delivering things and I m thinking, That used to be a person on a bicycle. What are they doing for a living? I go to the supermarket and there s maybe two or three checkers, which is probably the union minimum, and then everything else is a machine. Same thing happened when I went to the drugstore yesterday. The guy behind the cashier s counter was saying, “Oh, we ve got an empty machine right here.” I said, “No, I wanna work with you.” And, um…
Chloe Malle: What were you buying?
Fran Drescher: I bought two birthday cards and a conditioner.
Chloe Malle: What kind of conditioner?
Fran Drescher: What s the name of that conditioner? What is it? Kristin Ess. Oh, okay.
Chloe Malle: Fabulous.
Fran Drescher: Kristin Ess. And it s a very good product, I have to say. And, uh, it, uh, doesn t have any bad stuff in it, which is what I love.
Chloe Malle: Oh, great.
Fran Drescher: And I get the purple one, which, um, my hairdresser, Jon Lieckfelt, said is actually for blondes. But I said, but it just says that, you know, it controls brassiness and sometimes, you know, the gray hair starts to look reddish to me when it begins to fade, and I think it controls it. Anyway, I don t know. I m satisfied with it, so…
Chloe Malle: Oh, great!
Fran Drescher: So I bought the conditioner.
Chioma Nnadi: I really admire the fact that you have no trouble advocating for yourself or others, and I m wondering what it was like for you, you know, back in the ’90s with The Nanny, what were the sort of conditions then, what were there, were there moments where you found that you had to, you know, you had to sort of find your voice and be like, “I want things this way.”
Fran Drescher: I think it was, you know, I mean, I ve kind of always been like this. And—
Chioma Nnadi: Cause women find it hard to, to, to have difficult conversations in the workplace. I think especially around, you know…
Fran Drescher: Yeah. Interestingly enough, that was never my issue. My issue was putting myself in the equation of my life and always trying to help everybody else in my life and putting my own, my own needs on a back burner. And I think that this is true especially with a lot of women who get conditioned very early on to put the needs of others above their own. And I had to really learn how to speak my mind for me, and be able to say, you know, “Go ahead, that doesn t work for me and I m out.”
Chloe Malle: We were talking about how there s a great scene in The Nanny where you are pressured to cross a picket line and you say, no, Fran says no. And, uh… you said that no…
Fran Drescher: I, I came up with that storyline…
Chloe Malle: Was that because it was really based on your mother teaching you to never cross a picket line?
Fran Drescher: I do come from a working-class neighborhood, and my dad worked two jobs when I was young and a lot of my friends were, uh, their parents worked in the electricians union in our neighborhood. And I think being …growing up Jewish and coming from a kind of lower middle-class world, standing on the side of the worker, and doing right by other people and supporting the underdog is part of my DNA. It s part of the ethos of how I was raised. So yes, uh, you know, we would never cross a picket line. Never. I mean, I come from a family of, of turn-of-the-century and early 20th-century immigrants. So, you know, the jobs that they took on then were mostly sweatshop jobs and things of that nature. And so it was only, like, my father s generation that started to get some better jobs and then all of the children from that generation in the Drescher family, namely my generation, has done very well. And all of my characters are always not far from who I was growing up. You know, these working-class girls from a provincial background that really has her priorities straight. Maybe not so much with the shopping, but definitely with what s important in life. And that was the whole global message of The Nanny. It doesn t matter what you look like or what you sound like, it s what s in your heart that counts. So it s kind of a theme cuz I tend to play blue-collar girls that grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, uh, but have a heart of gold, like the hooker with the heart of gold is how I started my career.
Chloe Malle: We love that.
Fran Drescher: Yeah. Who doesn t love a hooker with a heart of gold?
Chloe Malle: And Fran, are you in Malibu now?
Fran Drescher: I am.
Chloe Malle: I like this sort of, is this—
Fran Drescher: The more work I could do from here, the more I can feel balanced. If I m here, then whatever they throw at me, I could process better.
Chloe Malle: Wonderful. Well, from Flushing to Malibu, we are so happy to have chatted with you, Fran.
Fran Drescher: My pleasure. And I m a subscriber.
Chloe and Chioma: Yeah! Oh my God, yay!
Chloe Malle: We love to hear it.
Fran Drescher: Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. And I even bought the, um, it must have been the French Vogue because I had a layover at Charles de Gaulle on my way home from the Dolce Gabbana, uh, event in Italy, and I got the one that has all the runway pictures.
Chioma Nnadi: Oh yeah. I know that one. “Collections.” Yeah.
Fran Drescher: Yeah. Oh, for me, uh, you know that that is the equivalent of sucking my thumb and twirling my hair.
Chloe Malle: Which collections did you love? Do you remember seeing any that you were like, “Ooh”?
Fran Drescher: You know, I ve never really been familiar with Off-White.
Chloe Malle: Mhm.
Fran Drescher: And, uh, now that I m familiar with it, I, you know, it s, it s piqued my interest.
Chloe Malle: Oh, we love, love it.
Fran Drescher: So, I mean, some of the things that are on the runway and maybe what gets printed is, I mean, I look at it as wearable art, but it s nothing that I would wear.
Chloe Malle: Right.
Fran Drescher: You know, and at this point I m like more conscious of covering up certain body parts that I think are not my best feature anymore or ever, really. But now it s like, okay, we re gonna wear a little sleeve here, ladies, and …
[LAUGHTER]
Fran Drescher: but I can still rock a midriff, so thank God for the little things. Yes.
Chloe Malle: We love that.
Fran Drescher: But I haven t had children, so maybe that s part of it.
Chloe Malle: Fran Drescher, I have one last question for you that we ve all been wondering. We read that you considered a run for the U.S. Senate when Hillary Clinton vacated her seat. And in 1960, when it was a double strike, Reagan was the president of SAG. Can we, are we gonna see Fran in the White House anytime soon?
Fran Drescher: You know, I always say probably not, because I find it to be such a toxic environment and look at what I m able to do from the outside.
Chloe Malle: Well, Fran, we re so lucky that we got to speak to you.
Chioma Nnadi: So lucky. So lucky. Thank you. It was such a pleasure to speak to you and we really hope that everything goes well with this, with this situation and you guys all figure out. We re all thinking of you.
Fran Drescher: Thank you. I love your accent.
Chioma Nnadi: Well, thank you. Love yours.
Fran Drescher. Thank you.
Chloe Malle: We should say that NBC Universal denied that trimming the trees outside of Universal Studios was malicious.
All right, that s it for this episode of The Run-Through.
Chioma Nnadi: Oh yeah, and don t forget: Next week we have a special surprise for you. We have two new hosts who are taking over while we have a couple weeks off.
The Run-Through with Vogue is a production of Condé Nast Entertainment.
Chloe Malle: The show is produced by Suzie Lechtenberg, Chelsea Daniel, and Alex Jhamb Burns, engineered by Gabe Quiroga and mixed by Mike Kutchman. Bye!
