Jane Fonda

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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 any more, 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.

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