People are always complaining about celebrities getting political on awards-show stages. And when you think of the typical ham-fisted appeal for a seemingly random pet cause or vaguely disapproving reference to what’s happening in Washington, it can be tempting to agree. But if you knew anything about Jane Fonda—who has always paired acting with activism—before she stepped up to accept the Life Achievement Award at Sunday’s 2025 SAG Awards, it was no surprise that her speech wasn’t just political, but also poised, gutsy, astute, and fully appropriate to the occasion. An impassioned argument for empathy, it was an instant classic of the genre and deserves to circulate far beyond the viewers who watched the ceremony live on Netflix.
Hailed with a standing ovation, Fonda approached the stage with a contagious energy that belied her 87 years. “Your enthusiasm makes this seem, I don’t know, less like a late twilight of my life and more like a ‘Go girl, kick ass,’” she told the crowd. “Which is good, because I’m not done.” Then she proceeded to demonstrate just how not-done she truly was. Over a series of sound gaffes that made the telecast’s production look a bit amateurish, Fonda remained a pro (“I can conjure up voices,” she ad-libbed when interrupted by miscued audio), briefly musing on her “weird career” that included a 15-year retirement and a renaissance in her ninth decade.
But she didn’t linger over her personal achievements. Instead, she quickly identified what is perhaps the most important contribution the people who make up Hollywood’s firmament make to the world at large. SAG-AFTRA is different from most unions, Fonda pointed out, because actors “don’t manufacture anything tangible. What we create is empathy. Our job is to understand another human being so profoundly that we can touch their souls.” Invoking her sex-worker character Bree Daniel, in Klute, she talked about how female actors can render palpable the pain of women who’ve survived abuse, incest, self-harm. Speaking to her male colleagues, she continued: “many of you guys have played bullies and misogynists. And you can pretty much know… their father bullied them and called men that he felt were weak… losers or pussies.” But “while you may hate the behavior of your character, you have to understand and empathize with the traumatized person you’re playing.” Without uttering the President’s name, Fonda shouted out Sebastian Stan’s performance as Donald Trump in The Apprentice.
These examples brought her to the crux of her speech, in which she connected the work actors do to surface every kind of person’s fundamental humanity with the crisis facing a society where empathy for marginalized people is increasingly undermined by those in power. “Empathy is not weak or ‘woke,’” she insisted, throwing in a pithy aside that immediately lit up social media: “‘Woke’ just means you give a damn about other people.” In an implicit reference to the policies of the new Trump Administration, Fonda warned her peers and viewers at home: “A whole lot of people are gonna be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way.” Yet this was not an exhortation to double down on partisanship. “Even if they’re of a different political persuasion, we need to call upon our empathy and not judge, but listen from our hearts and welcome them into our tent—because we are gonna need a big tent to resist successfully what’s coming at us.”
And then she issued a challenge to her fellow actors, reminding them of all the ways that their predecessors in Hollywood fought McCarthyism during the Red Scare of the 1950s and exhorting them to muster the same courage and community spirit. “Have any of you ever watched a documentary of one of the great social movements, like Apartheid or our Civil Rights Movement or Stonewall, and asked yourself: Would you have been brave enough to walk the bridge? Would you have been able to take the hoses and the batons and the dogs?” Fonda demanded. “We don’t have to wonder anymore, because we are in our documentary moment.”
It was a remarkable speech. Yet its power came not from her words themselves or how eloquently Fonda spoke them, but out of her six-plus decades of experience in often-controversial frontline activism. Famously, she doesn’t just write fat charity checks or shout out trendy causes whenever the entertainment industry puts an award in her hand. She earned the nickname “Hanoi Jane” for speaking out against the Vietnam War—a position that has aged well, even if some of the optics supporting it have not—while visiting North Vietnam in 1972. She used her celebrity to make films like Coming Home, which drew attention to the plight of Vietnam vets; China Syndrome, which sounded the alarm on the dangers of nuclear power; and 9 to 5, a feminist romp about sexual misconduct in the workplace. And she has continued that work in tandem with her acting, demonstrating with Indigenous Water Protectors at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in 2016 and getting repeatedly arrested while protesting in favor of the Green New Deal in D.C. When she speaks about her experiences with cancer, it is in service of persuading us that concurrent crises in public health and the environment are connected.
At a moment when faith in the soft political power of American pop culture is at an all-time low, it takes a figure like Fonda—who has consistently put not just her money but her body where her mouth is—to point the way forward for the artists and entertainers who are her peers. When she says, as she did on Sunday, “This is big-time, serious, folks,” she has earned their attention—and ours. In the end, Fonda’s prescription could not have been clearer: “We must not isolate. We must stay in community. We must help the vulnerable. We must find ways to project an inspiring vision of the future.” Which is precisely what she did on the SAG Awards stage.
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