Jane Fonda delivered a powerful speech urging people to “be brave” and “stay in community” at the SAG Awards on Sunday (23.02.25).
Jane Fonda at the SAG Awards
The 87-year-old actress was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement award at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles and reflected on how Hollywood banded together amid McCarthyism in the late 1950s and called for those in the industry to unite once again to “resist successfully” the current hostile political climate.
She said: “I’m a big believer in unions. They have our backs, they bring us into community and they give us power. Community means power and this is really important right now. Workers power is being attacked and community is being weakened, but SAG-AFTRA is different to most other unions because us, the workers, we actors, we don’t manufacture anything . 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 feel their joy and their pain…
“A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening and coming our way and even if they are of a different political persuasion, we need to call on 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 is 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 is helpful to remember that Hollywood resisted. Overseas, brave American producers hired blacklisted writers… They had a radio show on ABC Radio called Hollywood fights back. Members of the committee included every big name actor in town.
“Have any of you ever watched a documentary about one of the great movements, like aartheid or civil rights or stonewall and asked yourself, would you have been brave enough to walk the bridge? Would you have been brave enough to take the hoses and batons and the dogs?
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