While accepting the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Lifetime Achievement Award, Jane Fonda delivered a speech that combined her gratitude for the accomplishment, with activism last month.
The 87-year-old actress has been politically outspoken since the Vietnam War, and was often the target of public censure. Some veterans called her “Hanoi Jane” for her activism.
Fonda started her speech with gratitude as she reminisced about her career. She did not linger on her own personal accomplishments for long, though as she proceeded to speak about unions .
“I’m a big believer in unions.” she said. “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…workers’ power is being attacked, and community is being weakened. Yes. But SAG-AFTRA is different than most other unions because us, the workers, we actors, we don’t manufacture anything tangible.”
She spoke about her love of acting and said that the job of an actor is to create empathy. She said how actors have the ability to empathize with a character they are playing, even if they despise the actions and behaviors of that character.
“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 they do what they do. We feel their joys and their pain,” she said. “And while you may hate the behavior of your character, you have to understand and empathize with the traumatized person you’re playing, right? Thinking Sebastian Stan in “The Apprentice.”
On the topic of empathy, she proceeded to add her own definition to the word “woke.”
“Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke,” she said. “And by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people,” as the crowd applauded.
Though she did not directly mention Pres. Donald Trump by name, she made references to him when mentioning Stan, who portrays Trump in the movie “The Apprentice” and the new policies adopted under his administration as she proceeded to warn listeners of things to come.
“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’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 concluded her speech by urging people to come together.
“This is it,” she said. “ 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.”
