Fran Drescher’s Role of a Lifetime

In the heat of the actors strike that had ground Hollywood to a halt for months, Fran Drescher told the 34 members of SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee a story about an aikido student in Japan who gets into a tiff with a drunk on a train. Throughout the strike, it has been Drescher’s practice to often open or pepper meetings with a Buddhist saying or tale, and in this one, the aikido student is bracing for a fight, titillated by the opportunity to use his new martial arts skills, when an old passenger on the train intervenes and settles the drunk down by talking to him gently about sake. The story’s takeaway is clear: There is more than one way to resolve a conflict.

Now, 118 days into the strike, Drescher has certainly tried a few unorthodox methods of her own, from bringing a heart-shaped plushie into the negotiating room to eschewing what she refers to as “male energy” to publicly questioning if Disney CEO Bob Iger, arguably the most powerful person in Hollywood, is “an ignoramus.” That an actress best known for playing a fashion-conscious nanny from Flushing, Queens, is the person leading the 160,000-member actors union at this historic moment of labor unrest is, well, something you just can’t script. What seems clear is that Drescher has been both quirkier and savvier than her studio opposition was expecting.  

“I’m sure that people have underestimated her for her entire life,” SAG-AFTRA national executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland says of Drescher. “Fran is incredibly smart, she’s tenacious, she is dedicated. I deeply respect her. And the industry folks, if they didn’t already, have certainly learned to, as well.”  

Many in Hollywood expected the actors strike to resolve quickly after the Writers Guild of America closed its deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers on Sept. 24, but after resuming Oct. 2, SAG-AFTRA’s negotiations have gone on for five weeks and grown testy. The delay has imperiled the studios’ 2024 movie and TV slates and contributed to at least $6 billion in losses to the state of California alone, according to a Milken Institute estimate, as many production workers in SAG’s sister union IATSE have remained under- or unemployed for half a year during the work stoppages.  

The studios consider Drescher astute about her public persona but unable to close a deal with her own negotiating committee. “She has all the heart and all the hope,” says one studio-side source, who nevertheless questions if she has the skills to get a pact done. “She made a political movement of this thing, and now she’s got to [deliver].”  

Presiding over a sprawling union that has in the past been riven by political division, Drescher has adopted a modus operandi during the 2023 negotiations centered on building consensus. The SAG president refers to patience and listening as her “secret sauce,” an approach that has both helped unify the diverse group and seemingly drawn out its deliberations.

Drescher extended the guild’s “wages and working conditions” plenary committee process, where union leaders meet after gathering input from rank-and-file members (which can take months) before negotiations. This collating of information grew from one and a half or two days to seven days, with each session running eight to 12 hours.

“Fran saw that people were chomping at the bit to make sure their thing was heard, and she just slowed it all down and she kept extending it and extending it,” says negotiating committee member Sean Astin. Adds fellow committee member Shaan Sharma of her leadership in the negotiating committee, “What Fran has had to do is manage personalities. Her leadership style is more about making sure that everybody gets a chance to speak. She’s been incredibly effective in making sure everybody feels like they matter.”

Drescher occasionally suspends the usual two-minute limit on speaking in meetings, according to committee member Shari Belafonte. “She wouldn’t use the cutoff clock,” Belafonte says. “If you need 15 minutes, I’m gonna listen to ya. We were in there for nine hours.”

But the process has frustrated Drescher’s studio counterparts, who believe SAG-AFTRA has been taking far too long to resolve their side of the deal. The studios have been maddened by SAG’s lengthy presentations in the negotiating room, which felt, to some, like lectures. When talks picked back up in early October with studio CEOs present, SAG brought in working actors to talk about their hardships, such as losing their health care if there is a long gap between seasons of a show. While empathetic, some studio sources felt the clock ticking. “Their tempo the whole way through this negotiation has been A, very slow, and B, you close out something and they come back with a fresh ask. And we’re just beyond that,” one studio-side source says.  

Part of that pace is Drescher’s doing and part of it is the complexity of her job, which involves helping to broker a deal on behalf of everyone from highly paid Oscar winners to stunt performers, puppeteers and day players. “There’s a lot of drama and bitterness in the [SAG-AFTRA] boardroom, and that spills over into committees,” says one source with knowledge of the guild’s inner workings. “All those emotional actors wanting to blame someone else for their failed or nonexistent careers. So many people in leadership who don’t work [as actors] and therefore have no stake, but have an equal voice and vote to, say, Meryl Streep or Brad Pitt. It creates a toxic environment, makes it very hard to lead pragmatically.”  

Drescher has power to propel the process, but only so much. As the union president and the chair of SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee, she is a volunteer and unpaid, at once a leader in the group and also just one voice out of many. The negotiating committee, comprising 17 voting members and 17 alternates, votes on all important matters — proposal tweaks or making a concession to the studios, for instance — and Drescher has only one vote in that process, with the general consensus winning. “Fran is frequently on the winning and losing side of votes. So it’s not like what Fran says goes — she has to submit to the will of the group,” explains Sharma.

As the strike drags on, frustration has mounted among SAG’s members. In mid- October, after negotiations had broken down once more, a group of prominent actors including George Clooney, Ben Affleck, Reese Witherspoon, Kerry Washington and Ryan Reynolds participated in a series of Zooms with Drescher and Crabtree-Ireland to try to bring the parties back to the table. After the meetings, at which the A-listers proposed a new model for streaming residuals designed to benefit lower-paid actors, Drescher posted an Instagram story explaining why their suggestions wouldn’t work, calling them “apples and oranges.” One person on the Zoom calls expressed “abject frustration” about the state of the guild’s dealmaking, and some actors began channeling their grievances into a draft of a letter expressing concerns about SAG’s leadership.

When SAG instituted a rule barring Halloween costumes tied to struck companies, some members took their annoyance public, including Reynolds and former SAG president Melissa Gilbert, who posted on Instagram, “Do you really think this kind of infantile stuff is going to end the strike?” On Nov. 2, Everybody Loves Raymond actor Brad Garrett posted an exasperated Instagram video about the lack of information the guild was sharing. “The majority of the membership doesn’t know what the fuck is going on,” Garrett said. Of the negotiating committee, Garrett asked, “Who are these people?”  

As pressure to close the deal has mounted, Drescher has confided in her negotiating committee about the strain. “She’s not afraid to have that moment of vulnerability,” says negotiating committee member Jason George. “She doesn’t pretend this stuff isn’t hard. She’s constantly getting texts and emails from members, and she’ll share them. She’ll own however they make her feel.” 

As an actor, Drescher, 66, has been known for her work ethic and tenacity. Born in Queens to a naval systems analyst and a bridal consultant, she attended cosmetology school and got her first acting break with a small role as a dancer in Saturday Night Fever. Throughout the ’80s, Drescher found success as a character actress in films, among them Gorp and This Is Spinal Tap.

“She was trying all kinds of different things and working her ass off,” says Zack Norman, who played Drescher’s husband in 1990’s Cadillac Man.

With The Nanny, which she co-created with her first husband, Peter Marc Jacobson, and which aired on CBS from 1993 to 1999, Drescher became a household name. Audiences, particularly millennials, still have affection for that character, and it’s a persona Drescher has also brought into the negotiating room meetings, says Belafonte. “She’s the nanny,” Belafonte says. “She’s the one who is protective of all of us. Some of us in the room are groaning, it’s the ninth hour of a meeting, and she’s like (imitating Drescher’s Queens accent), ‘Grab a snack and sit down.’ ”

Drescher has also been shaped by major life setbacks and traumas, including a sexual assault at gunpoint in her 20s and a uterine cancer diagnosis in her 40s that led to an emergency hysterectomy. When Drescher and Jacobson, whom she had met at age 15, divorced in 1999, he came out of the closet and she became active in LGBTQ charities.

In bargaining, Drescher has brought a human touch, say members of her team. Drescher and union staff originated the SAG-AFTRA proposal for casts to share in streaming project revenue, and priorities she’s said to have championed in the room include the state of health care for elderly SAG-AFTRA members and protections against artificial intelligence.

“Our industry is in the middle of a historic paradigm shift, and Fran is focused on making sure that SAG-AFTRA moves forward in a way that positions our membership to be successful for the next 100 years,” says negotiating committee member Eric Goins. From the perspective of the labor group, the AI issue in particular is existential: If the union doesn’t secure meaningful protections now, SAG-covered roles could be imperiled.   

While Drescher’s methods haven’t exactly expedited negotiations, they may also enable actors to secure once-in-a-generation protections, her backers say. “She is kind of synonymous with not fitting in and coming at things from a different way,” says Kate Fortmueller, a Georgia State University associate professor who specializes in Hollywood labor. “Maybe she’s the right amount of wrong to really get the job done.”

Kim Masters and Pamela McClintock contributed to this report.

A version of this story first appeared in the Nov. 8 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.