Jane Fonda has never been one to mince words. But even for Hanoi Jane standards, the actress delivered a politically pointed speech during the annual SAG Awards Sunday night. While accepting a lifetime-achievement award before a crowd of her peers, the 87-year-old laughed her way through a couple of technical blunders before getting down to business. Over the course of a six-minute speech, the actress hailed the power of community and getting angry, urging her fellow actors to meet our current political moment, no matter how painful.
“I’m a big believer in unions. They have our backs, they bring us into community, and they give us power,” she said. “Community means power, and this is really important right now when workers’ power has been attacked and community is being weakened.”
Fonda then reminded the room that actors deal primarily in empathy, complimenting Sebastian Stan’s ability to play a “traumatized person” like Donald Trump in The Apprentice. “Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke,” she added to applause. “And by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people.”
“Have any of you ever watched a documentary of one of the great social movements — apartheid or the civil-rights movement or Stonewall — and asked yourself, Would you have been brave enough to walk the bridge?” Fonda said. “We don’t have to wonder anymore. We are in our documentary moment. This is it, and it’s not a rehearsal!” Trust her, she’d know: Over the last 50 years, she’s loudly protested everything from the Vietnam War to climate change via her Fire Drill Friday protests at the Capitol. After one such protest, she happily spent her 82nd birthday in jail.
“A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way,” Fonda said Sunday. “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.”