Jane Fonda accepted a lifetime achievement honor at the SAG Awards on Sunday, February 23, and nothing—not even some technical difficulties—could stand in the way of her electric speech.
Fonda, in blush-colored embroidered Armani Privé gown, received a standing ovation despite an interruption: As she spoke to a room filled with her fellow actors, a pre-recorded woman’s voice boomed over the sound system, cutting her off. Fonda played it perfectly though, deadpanning at the crowd, “I conjure voices,” and raising two fists.
Jane Fonda, being Jane Fonda, used her time on stage to express her gratitude for the SAG and AFTRA unions, which she segued into a rousing call to action. “This is really important right now when workers’ power is being attacked, and community is being weakened,” she said. “What we create is empathy. Our job is to understand another human being so profoundly that we can touch their souls.”
“A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way,” the 87-year-old continued. “And 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 going to need a big tent to resist successfully what’s coming at us.”
Actors, she continued, are uniquely qualified to bring empathy to the table given the depths they go to to understand some of their more reprehensible characters. “You may hate the behavior of your character, you have to understand and empathize with the traumatized person you’re playing. Thinking Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice,” she added, referring to Stan’s portrayal of a young Donald Trump. This reference was the closest she got to calling out the Trump administration specifically.
“Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke. And by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people,” she continued, to thunderous applause. She concluded her speech by thanking her peers for the award, which she called her “encouragement.”
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Always an icon.
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Julia Louis-Dreyfus presented the award to Fonda, delivering an ode to her 65-year career that includes not just her incredible body of work on film, but her activism, even nodding to her 1970 mug shot, which started “a beauty revolution.” At the time of her arrest, Fonda was touring North America for a series of anti-Vietnam War speaking engagements.
In an essay about the arrest, Fonda wrote that police confiscated her vitamins as she crossed the border from Canada into Cleveland, and she was charged with drug smuggling. “I told them what they were but they said they were getting orders from the White House–that would be the Nixon White House,” she writes. Ironically, she adds, her arrest made her speaking engagements all the more popular among college students. One thing’s for sure: Jane Fonda knows how to give a speech.
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