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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. My guest today is Jane Fonda. When she accepted the SAG After Lifetime

Achievement Award back in February, she used the moment to sound an alarm. Empathy is not weak or woke,

she told the room, urging her peers to use their platforms for good.

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?

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.

Six months later, I'm talking with Fonda, not about a new film or project, but about the path that brought her to that speech.

Born in 1937 into one of Hollywood's most famous families, Fonda came of age when women were expected to be seen, but not outspoken.

But through the decades, Fonda found her voice, first on screen, where she went on to win two Academy Awards.

In 1971, for Clute, playing a New York City call girl trying to leave sex work and pursue an acting career,

and in 1978, for coming home, portraying a military wife whose husband ships off to Vietnam.

Fonda's career and life choices have rarely been predictable.

In the 80s, she became an unexpected fitness mogul.

Her first workout tape remains the number one selling home video of all time.

And through the decades, she's chosen to live a life of resistance,

marching against the Vietnam War, supporting civil rights and Native American activists, and more recently as an environmental activist.

In 2019, she held weekly climate demonstrations on Capitol Hill, where she was arrested five times.

Jane Fonda, welcome back to fresh air.

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