“Who else could start a beauty revolution with her mugshot?” That’s how Julia Louis-Dreyfus introduced the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement winner Jane Fonda during Sunday night’s telecast.
The Oscar-winning actress, whose career has been a political lightning rod, then took the stage to deliver a call to arms for a movement—a movement, one would presume, against the current Trump administration and its firehose of edicts.
When listing all of Fonda’s career achievements, Louis-Dreyfus highlighted that beyond her trophy wins was her “spot on Richard Nixon’s enemies list.”
“I consider that the ultimate trophy,” Louis-Dreyfus said, likely referring to Fonda’s controversial political stances in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Accepting her trophy, Fonda joked about her longevity. “Probably in my 90s I’ll be doing my own stunts in action movies,” she said.
Empathy is not weak or “woke.” And, by the way, “woke” just means you give a damn about other people.”
—Jane Fonda accepting her SAG Lifetime Achievement Award pic.twitter.com/HMZcHzfR0J
— Spencer Althouse (@SpencerAlthouse) February 24, 2025
The rest of her speech was a rally cry. She joked about how characters are often misinterpreted. The men she rose up against on film, she said, are often called, “losers or p—ies.”
She specifically praised Sebastian Stan, who plays Donald Trump in his Oscar-nominated performance in The Apprentice. She called on viewers to understand people—and then rally against them.
“Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke. And by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people,” Fonda said to huge applause. “A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way. And even if they are of different persuasion we need to call upon our empathy and listen with 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.”
She then recalled her film career beginning in 1958 at the tail end of McCarthyism, remarking that “Hollywood resisted,” before tying everything back to current politics and how film creates empathy.
”Have any of you watched a documentary about one of our movements, like apartheid or the civil rights movement or Stonewall and asked yourself, ‘would you have been brave enough to walk a bridge?’ Or ‘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. This is it.”