As the 60th recipient of the SAG Life Achievement Award, Jane Fonda addressed the audience with a speech -- as any winner of such an award is wont to do. This speech, however, addressed the current United States political climate directly -- highlighting the importance of empathy in times of uncertainty across the country.
The 2025 Screen Actors Guild awards featured a number of impressive wins, from Anna Sawai to Jean Smart -- even Kristen Bell's hosting deserved an award, though they don't typically give anything out for that (they should!). Jane Fonda's speech, however, remains one of the more memorable moments of the evening.
“Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke," the actor said. "And by the way, ‘woke’ just means you give a damn about other people.”
There's a lot going on politically right now, much of it largely seemingly aimed to benefit one subset of the population while setting the rest up for even more hardship. It's easy for anyone, but especially celebrities, to criticize specific people in power for their actions -- and to be fair, it's often warranted and sometimes even beneficial when that happens. But Fonda used her speech to instead remind audiences that maybe, just maybe, caring about other people isn't to be frowned upon.
Some might roll their eyes at speeches like this -- after all, what do celebrities like Jane Fonda know about hardship and what it means to suffer, right? But that's the whole point of her commentary. Having empathy doesn't mean you've necessarily experienced what someone else has, or that you understand on a personal level how an executive order, for example, might impact someone and their family directly. But just because it might not effect you in the same way doesn't mean you shouldn't care.
When celebrities shy away from getting "political" because they claim not to know enough about a situation to comment on it, that really just shows their lack of empathy. Going "woke," according to Fonda, just means making an effort to think about how a decision is going to impact a stranger and maybe caring just a little bit about how that might feel.