Fran Drescher’s Leadership Fueled and Sustains the Actors’ Strike
Fran Drescher has made us laugh for years. Now she’s waking us up and making us think.
A voice for labor
On July 13, 2023, Drescher gave an impassioned speech as the members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) went on strike. The union had just voted to take that step in demand of fairer contracts and wages on the heels of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike. As of the second week in August, numerous insiders thought the strike could last through the end of the year.
“What’s happening to us,” the noted comedic actor said in a measured, confident tone, “is happening across all fields of labor.” Drescher added, “When employers make Wall Street and greed their priority, and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run, we have a problem, and we are experiencing that right at this moment.”
And so, after initially thinking negotiations could avert a strike, Drescher and SAG-AFTRA’s membership decided they had no choice but to go on strike. Knowing how their decision affected not only their own union and industry but other industries dependent on the entertainment industry around the world, she said that she and the union’s leadership approached this “crossroads” with both sadness and confidence. “We are the victims here,” she said.
“How they plead poverty,” she continued, speaking with disdain of the studios whose CEOs routinely earn hundreds of millions in compensation. “They stand on the wrong side of history.”
An unfair business model
On August 7, Drescher told CNN that the actors’ strike isn’t a matter easily solved by “incremental changes.” Instead, she said, there must be “holistic changes” in the overall business model of how actors are compensated by the studios.
The average actor’s annual salary is $65,000. For many people, that’s a lot of money. But as Drescher pointed out, this average includes the salaries of the top-earning celebrity actors in Hollywood, so it’s hardly reflective of what the bulk of SAG-AFTRA’s membership earns. In fact, 86 percent of them don’t make the $26,500 per year needed to claim their industry healthcare benefits. “That’s a part-time job,” Drescher said.
Side-lined by big tech
Like their counterparts among the writers, SAG-AFTRA’s members are focused not only on wages that keep pace with the economy but on contracts that protect them from predatory practices emerging with the rollout of artificial intelligence and streaming entertainment platforms. These technologies have already demonstrated their ability to keep performers’ wages and residuals artificially low.
On July 24, Rolling Stone quoted voice actor Natalie Vigil saying she’s concerned about losing work to AI voice technology. “AI can be a great thing, it can be an incredibly helpful thing, but it can also be an incredibly dangerous thing, so we need some guardrails so people can continue to make a living.”
Bri Collins, who appeared in the Amazon mini-series The Underground Railroad, started out as a background extra. Now, she told Rolling Stone, it’s very possible for producers to take a scanned image of one of these performers “and use it for eternity” without fair compensation. The article also pointed out that, thanks to streaming services, actors now often receive residual checks totaling only a few cents.
Everyone’s favorite nanny
Francine Joy Drescher, best known as Fran Fine on the 1993-99 TV sitcom The Nanny, is known for making her distinct voice heard on matters of justice and equity.
Born to a working-class Jewish family in 1957 in Queens, New York, Drescher had a small role in the 1977 movie Saturday Night Fever. Sixteen years later, she co-created and starred in The Nanny. Based partly on her own experiences as a beautician from Queens, it became her signature show. She went on to star in feature films like The Beautician and the Beast (1997) and Hotel Transylvania (2012) and its sequels. Critics often compare Drescher, with her exuberant on-screen persona and precision comic timing, to Lucille Ball. But there’s been a thoughtful, serious side to her personality from the beginning.
Making everyone’s rights her issue
Her hard-fought election as president of SAG/AFTRA in 2021, and her rousing speech on the day of the strike, only highlighted Drescher’s commitment to standing up for the rights of others.
During the heyday of The Nanny, Drescher earned recognition as a dedicated champion for the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals. Leveraging her creative influence over the show, she consistently portrayed gay characters as the genuine and ordinary individuals they are, well before influential LGBTQ+ shows like Will & Grace aired.
Offscreen, Drescher has supported LGBTQ+ rights as human rights, and it’s not only because The Nanny has so many queer fans who relate to its high-fashion protagonist and fish-out-of-water theme. In 2020, she told Out magazine that her “advocacy came before the fandom.” She stood in support of marriage equality well before it gained widespread attention, and her commitment to advocacy grew even stronger when her ex-husband, with whom she maintains a close relationship, came out as gay.
Drescher also hasn’t neglected to advocate for her own community. When Hollywood executives tried to persuade her to make Fran Fine Italian, not Jewish, she refused to erase her own or the character’s identity. And as a survivor of uterine cancer, she started a foundation, Cancer Schmancer (named after her book about her experience), to help others who don’t have her resources.
Drescher has also earned her union cred. Her first job was as a grocery store clerk. She left college for cosmetology school while building her acting career. She told the Today Show in July that one of the major life lessons she learned from her mother is to never cross a picket line. She even worked that value into an early episode of The Nanny. Her character stood outside a Broadway theater afterparty rather than insult the striking workers, while her rich employer sauntered right into the venue.
Even many of her critics among the SAG-AFTRA membership acknowledge Drescher’s gifts as a motivating force that can draw people together across differences to accomplish a common goal. This role could very well be the one she was destined to portray.