SORRY SWEETIE

Jennifer Saunders Talks “AbFab” Movie And Says She Wanted to Play Thatcher

Don’t uncork the Bolly just yet. Jennifer Saunders has put the kibosh on another French & Saunders series and said she’s ambivalent about the long-discussed AbFab film.

During an interview with British talk show Chatty Man this week, the comic actress tells host Alan Carr it’s Joanna Lumley who’s been pushing her to write an Absolutely Fabulous film.

“She keeps going on about it,” Saunders jokes. “Why doesn’t she write it? I think she is trying to get more work out of me.”

Is it going to happen? “I just feel we’re all too old,” Saunders says, echoing our feelings while watching the last series of specials. cheersdarlings

Saunders also reveals that a rumored new season of her classic French & Saunders sketch show, on which she costarred with pal Dawn French and which actually launched the AbFab series, is not in the cards. The reason? Filthy lucre, sweetie.

“When we first made the show there was a good budget,” Saunders says about the show which offered hilarious spoofs of Bjork videos and movies such as Gone With the Wind and Titanic. “You could afford to make it look how you wanted it to look and you could do what you wanted. Nowadays we wouldn’t have that and it wouldn’t look as good as the ones we’ve done before.”

But Saunders’ big reveal is that she wanted to play Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, which won a third Oscar for someone you might have heard of named Meryl Streep.

Saunders, who played Maggie in a comedy revue in 2011, tells Carr that she’d like to have branched out a bit and starred in the award-winning drama. “There are lots of things I now regret, like I would have liked to do the Thatcher film, The Iron Lady.”

Did Streep steal Saunders’ chance at Oscar glory? We’d drink to seeing Edina Monsoon at the Academy Awards.

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