At tonight’s SAG Awards, actress and activist Jane Fonda accepted the 60th Life Achievement Award to a raucous round of applause. “Your enthusiasm makes this seem less like a twilight of my life and more like a, ‘Go girl, kick ass!’” she told the audience, “Which is good, because I’m not done.”
In her lengthy acceptance speech, the 87-year-old Fonda discussed the scope of her career and her status as a so-called “late bloomer.” She continued, “I retired for a few years and then I came back at 65, which is not usual, and then I 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,” she joked. “Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘It’s OK 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.”
She then used the opportunity to encourage her fellow actors to remember the value of empathy, particularly during times when that empathy is challenged. “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,” she said. She pointed to the significance of a union like SAG-AFTRA as an entity that “bring[s] us into community.”
“Community means power,” she said. “And this is really important right now, when 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. What we create is empathy. Our job is to understand another human being so profoundly that we can touch their souls…And while you may hate the behavior of your character, you have to understand and empathize with the traumatized person you’re playing, right?”
She then took a subtle but undeniable shot at the conservative co-opting of the term “woke,” which has been used to denounce initiatives for diversity, equity, and inclusion across the country, especially in the days since President Trump’s inauguration last month. “Make no mistake,” Fonda said. “Empathy is not weak or ‘woke.’ And by the way, ‘woke’ just means you give a damn about other people.”
She finished by concluding that the U.S. is “in our documentary moment,” she said. “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. 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!”