At last night’s Screen Actors Guild Awards, Jane Fonda was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award and gave an emotional speech urging viewers to embrace empathy and come together amid the increasingly tense political climate in the US.
Presented the award by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who described Fonda a ‘powerhouse of raw dramatic talent’, Fonda received a standing ovation before and after her impassioned words. As a political activist for decades, Fonda has long been fighting for civil, women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. Now, she says, the US is experiencing its ‘documentary moment’ following Donald Trump’s election.
Here is Jane Fonda’s full speech at the SAG Awards:
‘This means the world to me,’ she began. ‘And your enthusiasm makes it seem less like a twilight of my life and more like a “Go girl, kick ass!” which is good because I’m not done. I have had a really weird career, totally unstrategic. I retired for 15 years and came back at 65, made one of my most successful movies in my 80s and probably in my 90s I’ll be doing my own stunts in an action movie. Have you ever heard the phrase, “It’s okay to be a late bloomer as long as you don’t miss the flower show”? I’m a late bloomer; this is the flower show!’
‘I love acting,’ Fonda continued. ‘We get to open people’s mind to new ideas, make them beyond what they understand of the world and help them laugh when things are tough, like now. For a woman like me who grew up in the 40s and 50s when women weren’t supposed to have opinions and get angry, acting gave me a chance to play angry women with opinions, which as you know is a bit of a stretch for me.
‘I’m a big believer in unions, they have our backs, they bring us into community, and they give us power. Community means power. This is really important right now when workers power is being attacked, and community is being weakened. SAG Afra is different than most other unions. Us, the workers, we actors, we 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, we know why they do what they do, we can feel their joy and their pain. We have to drill deep, don’t we? We have to know if a young woman is cutting or a sex worker, there’s a good chance that as a 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 boys and misogynists, and you can know actors right that they’re father probably boyed them and men that he thought we were weak he called them “losers” or “pussies”. While you may hate the behaviour of your character, you have to understand and empathise with the traumatised person you’re playing, right? Thinking Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice.
‘Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke and by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people. Back to empathy, a whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming out 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. I made my first movie in 1958; it was the tail end of McCarthyism when so many careers were destroyed. Today it’s helpful to remember though that Hollywood resisted, we did. Oversees, brave American producers like Hannah Weinstein, hired blacklisted writers. Myrna Lloyd, John Huston and Billy Wilder founded the Committee for the First Amendment. They had a radio show on ABC Radio called Hollywood Fights Back. Members of the committee included every big-name actor in town.
‘Have you ever watched a documentary of one of the great social movements? Like Apartheid or the Civil Rights Movement or Stonewall? Ask yourself, would you have been brave enough to walk the bridge, take the hoses and the batons and the dogs? 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 mustn’t for a moment kid ourselves about what’s happening. This is big time serious folks, so let’s be brave. This is a good time for a little Norma Rae or Karen Silkwood or Tom Joad.
‘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 - one that is beckoning, welcoming, that will help people 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 an ocean of truth for us to swim in.” Let's make it so. Thank you for this encouragement.’