Despite audio issues and a miscue from the announcer, Jane Fonda got her message across at the 2025 SAG Awards. Accepting the Lifetime Achievement Award, Fonda used the time to call her fellow actors to take a stand against the Trump administration and to face the political moment head-on. “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?” Fonda asked. “We don’t have to wonder anymore, because we are in our documentary moment. This is it, and it’s not a rehearsal.”
Fonda shouted out her union, SAG-AFTRA, saying, “I’m a big believer in unions. They have our backs, they bring us into community, and they give us power. Community means power. And this is really important right now, when workers’ power is being attacked and community is being weakened.” What makes the actors union different from steelworkers, she said, is that the product they manufacture is empathy. Fonda said the point of acting is to understand someone so well you feel what they’re feeling, even for someone like Sebastian Stan when he plays Donald Trump in The Apprentice. “A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way,” she said. “And even if they are 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.” Get Jane Fonda into DNC comms, stat.