Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535197
O ur times call for empathy and community-building, says 60th Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award honoree Jane Fonda. In an Actor to Actor conversation with SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher, Fonda discusses the looming climate threat, asserting that "humankind has never been confronted with a small window of time in which we can save civilization or not." She shares her insights about women's capacity for resilience as well as what she gained from going to therapy after completing her first season of Grace and Frankie (2015–2022). What other lessons has Fonda learned in her seven-decade career? Please enjoy this edited version of Fonda and Drescher's conversation. 60 th S c re e n Ac tors G u i l d Li fe Ac h ie ve me n t Awa rd honore e Ja ne F ond a d i s c u s s e s h e r l i fe a nd c a re e r wi th S AG -A F TR A P re si d e n t F ra n D re s c h e r. sagaftra.org | Spring 2025 | SAG -AF TR A 85 FRA N DRESCHER: Well, hello, Jane Fonda. What an honor it is to speak to you. JA NE FONDA: And I'm honored to be in front of you, Fran, the president of my union. FRA N: Let's talk a little bit about women's rights, because you've been such a women's advocate and activist. I'm curious what it feels like to make the advancements and then start to see them being gnawed away? Like, you can never rest on your laurels. You can never really feel like, okay, we did that. What is that like for you? JA NE: I learned early on in my time as an activist that you can never rest on your laurels when it comes to who has power. What has happened over the last many decades is that, very slowly, women have begun — we're not there by any matter of means — but we have begun to take power. We've moved into the corporate world. We've moved more into the political world, judicial and cultural. In other words, what we see now — the attacks on us and the clawing back — is because we've been so successful. When we see all this happening, we have to remember it's because we've been successful and they are scared to death. And they have every right to be; there's a reason that women have been pushed down and oppressed for millennia. This is not new. This has been from the beginning of civilization. And I just want to talk about that for a second. FRA N: Yeah. JA NE: I'm not a sociologist or anything, or an anthropologist, but … men are conditioned to not ask for help. This is a huge strength that women have. We know that we have to stay together. We know to ask for help. And so we get it. Because of our biology, our menses, having children, all the things that happened to us bodily have made us the half of the species that is okay with change. We roll with the punches. And men die first. We tend to live on average about five, six years longer than men. And we do very well as single women. And the studies and research shows that with divorce, women thrive. I'm not saying all this because we are better than men. I love what Gloria Steinem says: "Women aren't better than men, we just don't have our masculinity to prove." … And in a time like this when the climate is caving in on us and there's conflict everywhere, we have an advantage. FRA N: Well, I think that your point is really well taken. It's great that you said that the reason why this is happening now is because we have been so successful. So we have to double down on that and make sure everybody knows that we're not going to recede, but move forward. JA NE: We have to hold it. I talked [in my acceptance speech] about empathy. We have to have empathy for men. We don't have to get angry. We have to get angry when it's justified. But I don't know. I just love men. I feel a lot of empathy for them. But I just remembered a quote that my favorite ex-husband, Ted Turner, said. He said, "Men have been in power for thousands of years, and we fucked it up, and now we have to give it over to women." And I think that time has come, you know. I've become, in the last decade, a climate activist and all of the leadership is women. FRA N: I started Green Council here at the union, and our first mission is to eliminate all single-use plastic water bottles on sets. So, the environmental issues … Look at what we've just gone through in Los Angeles. The county fires. JA NE: Yeah. I had the flu at the time. I was lying in bed watching the fires. I never turned it off. I mean, I just was glued like a lot of people. And I just kept thinking, "This is just the beginning." Fran, it's going to get a lot worse. FRA N: I would like to ask you … I love rom-coms. So the first time I ever saw Barefoot in the Park, I loved that movie so much. However, you definitely reached a point in your career where you ended up doing very dramatic movies. And so what would you say was the first turning point that allowed you to explore parts of yourself that were more challenging emotionally? JOHN SALANGSANG / SHUTTERSTOCK FOR SAG-AFTRA JOHN SALANGSANG / SHUTTERSTOCK FOR SAG-AFTRA