Fran Drescher: Trump wanted us to call him a ‘billionaire’ on The Nanny

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Back in 2017, Fran Drescher said that she was interested in doing a reboot of The Nanny and that she was taking meetings. Last September, she announced that she was talking with Cardi B’s team about the possibility of Cardi starring in a reboot. Fran stopped by Late Night with Seth Meyers on Monday to talk about her new sitcom, Indebted, which premieres this week. She’s also developing a musical based on The Nanny. Fran shared a story about working on the original show with guest star Donald Trump, who played himself.

Trump loves talking about how much money he [supposedly] has. He even wants to talk about it in the fictional world of a television show set in New York, and he wants to make sure that everyone knows how rich he is. Don’t call him a lowly “millionaire,” which is what Fran’s character initially did during a scene with Trump and Charles Shaughnessy, who played Fran’s boss, Maxwell Sheffield:

“I stood in this scene and I said to the two of them, ‘Oh, all you millionaires are alike,'” Drescher explained of the scene in which Trump, 73, appeared, in 1996.

“And Peter [Marc Jacobson] — now my gay ex-husband — got a note from his assistant, Donald Trump’s assistant, that said, ‘Mr. Trump is not a millionaire. He’s a billionaire, and we’d like you to change the script,'” Drescher explained.

But the Indebted star said she thought using the word “billionaire” “seemed too on the money.”

“Cause I know Fran would’ve, you know, described everyone who was rich as a millionaire,” she said of her character on the show, Fran Fine. “But to say ‘billionaire’ seems like a specific choice.”

“So we asked them if it would be okay if we wrote ‘zillionaire’ and he said that was fine,” she told Meyers with a laugh.

[From People]

The is on Youtube.

I can’t even groan about this, only say, “Of course that’s what Trump did.” If it were anybody else, we’d just roll our eyes and laugh at the person’s ego, but this story is both pathetic and retroactively chilling, because it underscores what we’d learn about Trump’s obsession with controlling the narratives about himself to the point where he fixates on ridiculous things. Who cares how much money he has? That’s (in the world of the show), totally irrelevant. Fran is making fun of Trump and Max, who are both Very Rich People. That’s the joke. Whether Trump is a millionaire or a billionaire is beside the point. Of course, we also know that Trump can’t take a joke, either. I’m watching to see if he ends up tweeting about this. He’ll probably say that he thought “zillionaire” was funnier, so he suggested it.

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Fran Drescher said everyone eventually agreed to “zillionaire” after Trump's 1996 cameo "billionaire" moniker demands

— New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) February 5, 2020

The creator and actress is developing her '90s sitcom into a musical

— CR FASHION BOOK (@CRFASHIONBOOK) February 2, 2020