Fran Drescher on What’s Lost When Hollywood’s So Beholden to Shareholders

Fran Drescher has been president of SAG-AFTRA since 2021, but it was her tenacity and righteous anger at the studios during last year’s strike that made her an icon. We’re proud to include her in our 2024 Hollywood Issue portfolio dedicated to “the power and the glamour” of the entertainment industry.

Vanity Fair: Last year was such a time of disruption and change. What can you tell us about the future of the town and business we love?

Fran Drescher: Well, the world loves entertainment, but entertainment has to be for the viewers and not the shareholders—and therein lies the rub. When you invest in a Broadway show, you may lose your shirt, but you’re part of a culture that is unique and special, and you love the art form. So when you invest in entertainment, movies, and television, I feel like you have to think that way as well. Once it becomes more about Wall Street than the people that are making it—and the collaborative art form that it must always remain—it becomes problematic and really, in my opinion, unsustainable. The pressure that these companies are put under to continually perform for the shareholders is completely unrealistic. And as a result of that, you end up finding ways to show profit that ultimately compromise the very people that are foundational to making the product.

How have you enjoyed this chapter of your career?

I’m enjoying the platform upon which I can speak to issues that are important. I think that I offer a perspective that is uniquely my own. And for that reason, I’m very proud to be given this coveted position. I just got back from Europe, and everywhere I went workers thanked me. I spoke the truth and it was like “The Emperor’s New Clothes”—all of a sudden, everybody woke up and realized that they are important! Business has to be more inclusive for the people that actually make the product. Otherwise, it’s a new version of land barons and peasants, and that’s not gonna fly. It has to be about respect and empathy for others, as well as the planet itself. Otherwise, we’re mindlessly driving ourselves into extinction. We must have another human growth spurt because the last major one gave the species a kind of a brain that allowed it to invent to solve a problem. Now we have to catch up emotionally and spiritually with the ability to invent, because if you don’t invent something and make part of every decision-making process inclusive with empathy and long-sightedness, maybe what you’re inventing is not what we need.

Hair, Jon Lieckfelt; Makeup, Gregory Arlt; manicure, Chantalynn; set design, Thomas Thurnauer. Produced on location by Madi Overstreet. For details, go to VF.com/credits.