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This is fresh air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today we continue our end-of-the-year retrospective, featuring some of our favorite interviews of 2025.

My guest today is Jane Fonda.

When she accepted the SAG After Lifetime Achievement Award last 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 had the chance to talk with Fonda about the path that ultimately led her to that speech.

Born in 1937, into one of Hollywood's most famous families,

she came of age at a time when women were expected to be seen, but certainly not outspoken.

Over the decades, though, Fonda steadily

found her voice, first on the screen where she earned 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 again in 1978 for coming home, portraying a military wife whose

husband ships off to Vietnam. Fonda's career and life choices have rarely followed a predictable

script. In the 1980s, she became an unlikely fitness mogul. Her first workout tape is still the

best-selling home video of all time.

She marched against the Vietnam War, supported civil rights and Native American activists,

and more recently, threw herself into environmental activism. In 2019, she led weekly climate

...