Jane Fonda used the SAG Awards to warn viewers of what’s to come in today’s political climate.
After Julia Louis-Dreyfus presented her with the Life Achievement Award, the 9 to 5 star commanded the room with her lengthy and powerful acceptance speech, speaking to her love of acting before the longtime activist gave a call to action.
“We get to open people’s minds to new ideas, take them beyond what they understand of the world, and help them laugh when things are tough. Like now,” she said.
Noting that she grew up in the 40s and 50s, “when women weren’t supposed to have opinions and get angry,” the legendary star said that acting granted her the opportunity to “play angry women with opinions.”
“Which, as you know, is a bit of a stretch for me, but…,” she teased.
Fonda then highlighted that she is a “big believer in unions,” elaborating that “they have our backs.”
“They bring us into community,” she continued. “And they give us power, community means power, and this is really important right now, when… workers’ power has been attacked, and community is being weakened.”
According to Fonda, “SAG-AFTRA is different than most other unions” because its members “don’t manufacture anything tangible.”
“What we create is empathy,” she said. “Our job is to understand another human being so profoundly that we can touch their souls. We know why we do what they do. We feel their joys and their pain.”
Fonda was briefly interrupted by a voice over the speaker, to which she quipped, “And I can conjure up voices!
“We have to drill deep, don’t we?” she continued. “We have to know, for example, if a young woman is cutting, or she’s a sex worker. There’s a good chance that as a young girl she was sexually abused or incested, right? I’m thinking Bree Daniels in Klute. And I’m sure many of you guys have played bullies and misogynists. And you can pretty much know, you actors, right, that probably their father bullied them and called men that he felt were weak, he called them losers or pussies.
“And while you may hate the behavior of your character, you have to understand and empathize with the traumatized person you’re playing. I’m thinking Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice,” she added, referring to Stan’s portrayal of a younger President Donald Trump. “Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke. And by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people.”
After some applause, Fonda returned to the topic of “empathy,” warning that “a lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening” and “what is coming our way.”
“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,” she said.
Citing Hollywood’s history of resistance, she eventually asked the audience, “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 to take the hoses and the batons and the dogs?” she added. “We don’t have to wonder anymore, because we are in our documentary moment. This is it. And it’s not a rehearsal. This is it. And we must not for a minute kid ourselves about what’s happening. This is big-time serious, folks. So, let’s be brave.”
Fonda ended her speech with a call on the public to “stay in community.”
“We must help the vulnerable. We must find ways to project an inspiring vision of the future,” she shared. “One that is beckoning, welcoming, that will help people to believe that to quote the novelist Pearl Cleage, ‘On the other side of the conflagration, there will still be love, there will still be beauty, and there will be oceans of truth for us to swim in.’ Let’s make it so.”