While accepting her Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild on Sunday, 87-year-old Jane Fonda showed that she’s still one of Hollywood’s most famous firebrands by urging her fellow actors to stand up to the Trump administration and to face his political movement head-on.
Without directly naming Trump, Fonda also suggested a way her colleagues can use empathy to find the fortitude to effectively challenge the newly inaugurated 47th president and his seemingly invisible MAGA movement.
“What we, actors, create is empathy,” said the screen icon, while overcoming audio issues during her speech. “Our job is to understand another human being so profoundly that we can touch their souls. And make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke. By the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people.”
Speaking to a room full of actors, she also suggested a way to make Trump and his presidency seem less intimidating. She said they could apply a common actor’s strategy, based on empathy, for preparing to play an unsympathetic character
“I’m sure many of you guys have played bullies and misogynists, and you can pretty much know, you actors, right, that probably their fathers bullied them and called men that (they) felt were weak, (they) called them losers or pussies,” Fonda said. “While you may hate the behavior of your character, you have to understand and empathize with the the traumatized person you’re playing, right?”
“I’m thinking of Sebastian Stan in ‘The Apprentice,’” Fonda then said, making a direct reference to a the actor playing a young Donald Trump in this past year’s controversial biopic, which premiered in May at the Cannes Film Festival.
Stan is nominated for a best actor award at the upcoming Academy Awards, portraying Trump as an eager young real estate developer from Queens in the 1970s who wants to make his mark in Manhattan. Under the guidance of the brilliant but vicious and ethically challenged attorney Roy Cohn, Trump is introduced to the corridors of New York City power and undergoes a political awakening.
Stan’s portrayal in “The Apprentice,” in fact extends some empathy to Trump. As Fonda suggested, the film shows Trump being bullied and under-appreciated by his father, Fred Trump. As a consequence, he turns to Cohn as a father figure.
But Trump, like Cohn, emerges in the film as a morally challenged figure with petty vanities and difficult interpersonal relationships with his family. Stan’s version of him soon experiences erectile dysfunction, receives liposuction, and, most controversially, is depicted as raping his wife Ivana, the mother of his children, Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric, after she tells him he’s getting fat and ugly. (In her 1990 divorce deposition, Ivana Trump described being sexually assaulted by her husband in 1989 after he underwent scalp-reduction surgery to correct his hair loss. In 2015, she walked back on the claim, saying her use of the term rape wasn’t meant in “a literal or criminal sense,” as The Guardian reported. Trump also has denied he ever assaulted his first wife,)
Because of its subject matter, “The Apprentice” faced attempts by Trump’s legal team to block it and struggled to find a North American distributor to release it theatrically. It was eventually released in American theaters in October and on demand in November. Trump responded to the film’s release, ahead of the Nov. 5 election, by slamming it as “a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job.” He also said it was made to “hurt the Greatest Political Movement in the History of our Country, ‘MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
After Trump was elected, liberal-leaning Hollywood stood up to Trump in one way, with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominating Stan for best actor. It also nominated Jeremy Strong, who portrays Cohn, for best supporting actor.
But in other ways, the industry is reeling from Trump’s return to power, as Vulture reported in January. Hollywood also is coming to the realization that, culturally and politically, it “doesn’t matter as much as it thinks it matters,” as one talent manager with A-list clients told Vulture in January.
In its report, Vulture said that “most movie-business insiders are hunched in a crash position” as they await blowback from “a famously vindictive president.” After facing the COVID-19 pandemic and twin Hollywood strikes and the Los Angeles fires, “the inhabitants of the Thirty-Mile Zone know sweeping change is coming,” Vulture senior reporter Chris Lee said. These film and TV professionals, ranging from studio executives to on-set crew members, “predict Hollywood will generally become more self-censoring and less capable of critiquing the current political moment, if not less influential overall.”
But Fonda drew on her six decades in movies, and her long experience in activism on behalf of civil rights, gender equality and the anti-war movement to explain why it’s important for people in Hollywood to have a voice in culture and politics — especially now.
“A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening,” the two-time Oscar winner said. “Even if they’re of a different political persuasion, we need to not judge but listen from our hearts.”
“Have any of you ever watched a documentary of one of the great social movements? Like apartheid or our civil-rights movement or Stonewall, and asked yourself would you have been brave enough to walk the bridge?” she said. “We don’t have to wonder anymore, because we are in our documentary moment. This is it, and it’s not a rehearsal.”
Fonda noted that her career began in the late 1950s, amid anti-communist hysteria.
“I made my first movie in 1958,” Fonda said. “It was at the tail end of McCarthyism, when so many careers were destroyed. Today, it’s helpful to remember, though, that Hollywood resisted.”
Fonda also spoke to the power of unions, including SAG-AFTRA, to protect people during challenging moments in history. “They bring us into community, and they give us power. Community means power, and this is really important right now when workers’ power has been attacked and community is being weakened.”
Fonda concluded her speech by calling on Hollywood to channel optimism and believe that on the other side, “there will still be love, there will still be beauty, and there will be an ocean of truth for us to swim in.”