Jane Fonda isn’t even close to done fighting for what she believes in—and at the 2025 SAG Awards in Los Angeles Sunday night, while accepting a lifetime achievement award, she urged Hollywood, and viewers everywhere, to fight right alongside her.
Introduced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who joked that Fonda makes everyone else look bad thanks to both her towering achievements in acting and her longtime political activism—most recently, the Oscar winner was arrested five times in October 2019 for environmental protests at the U.S. Capitol—the 87-year-old Fonda received a standing ovation as she made her way to the stage.
“What we, actors, create is empathy,” Fonda said. “Our job is to understand another human being so profoundly that we can touch their souls. And make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke. By the way: woke just means you give a damn about other people.”
Fonda also urged her fellow actors not only to extend empathy to like-minded people. “A whole lot of people are gonna be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way,” she said, presumably alluding to the current presidential administration. ”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 gonna need a big tent to resist successfully what's coming at us.”
Fonda partially credited her passion for acting to coming of age in the ‘40s and ‘50s, when “women weren’t supposed to have opinions and get angry.”
“I love acting,” Fonda said. “We get to open people’s minds to new ideas, and help them laugh when things are tough—like now.”
She evoked charged political times both past and present, and urged her colleagues to fight back.
“I made my first movie in 1958,” she said. “It was at the tail end of McCarthyism, when so many careers were destroyed. Today, it’s helpful to remember, though, that Hollywood resisted. We did.”
“Have any of you ever watched a documentary of one of the great social movements — of apartheid or civil rights or Stonewall—and ask yourself, would you have been brave enough to walk the bridge?” she continued. “Would you have been able to 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!”
And Fonda herself is nowhere near done. After joking that “probably in my nineties I’ll be doing my own stunts in an action movie,” she made it clear that her “unstrategic” career will continue to include fighting for her beliefs.
“We must not isolate. We must stay in community. We must find ways to project an inspiring message of the future. There will still be love. There will still be beauty. And there will be an ocean of truth for us to swim in,” she said, closing out her remarks. “Let’s make it so. Thank you for this encouragement.”
For even more SAG Awards 2025 news, check out Vanity Fair’s list of the night’s best-dressed stars, gallery of every single red carpet look of the night, and the complete winners list from the night.
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