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was sitting around in Big Sur with pals use plastics, started driving an elec-Rosanna Arquette and Catherine Keen-er feeling “very depressed that I wasn’t doing enough about the climate cri-sis.” She’d already stopped using single- ast Labor Day weekend, Jane Fonda tric car, and cut back on meat, but she still yearned to make a bigger impact. “Wcredible potential platform, but how do you use it?” Fonda says. And then she re-hen you’re famous, you have this in-
terred, but “didn’t want to be some aging movie star moving The WGreenpeace USA, and told her she was going to camp out in front of the Wto environmental organizations and students who, inspired to DC” and butting in on existing activists, so she reached out you’re willing to do that, but it’s illegal,’” says Fonda, laughing over a hummus platter one February weekend afternoon at by Greta Thunberg, had been protesting on Fridays, wonder-final season of Netflix’s So she called up Annie Leonard, the executive director of ing in Los Angeles, where she’s filming the seventh and hite House. “She said, ‘Walized, “I have to put myself on the line.”Grace and Frankieell, that’s great that. Fonda was unde-
students will welcome you, and if they do, go every Friday,” leaders to address climate change. She dubbed her movement Fonda says. “So right away, I went to DC.” arrested and herded into police vans, wrists zip-tied. ginning in October, Fonda and a diverse coalition of groups staged weekly protests in front of the Capitol to pressure ing where the adults were. Someone told her to “see if the “Fire Drill Fridays,” and soon Fonda and a host of famous friends, including costar Lily Tomlin and Ted Danson, were her celebrity: People were going to watch her, and she could She was greeted with open arms, and for 14 weeks be-Long ago, Fonda made an important calculation about
spoken out against the status quo and made headlines for of people power and feminism. agitating against authority, be it opposition to the Vietnam Wstart with her then-husband, political activist Tom Hayden, in 1970, fist raised and hair shagged, became an iconic symbol use their attention to promote her agenda. For decades, she’s was created to raise funds for an organization she helped exercise videos that became a global aerobics phenomenon—to end corporate control of the economy. Inspired by Lyndon ar or social inequality. Her mug shot from a Cleveland jail Even the Jane Fonda workout—her quintessential-1980scomputer business profits to pay for antigay protests, Fonda LaRouche, an infamous fascist hatemonger who used his tried to think of what business she could start to fund the causes she cared about. She thought about starting a restau-rant, but after someone advised her not to go into an industry she didn’t understand, she thought, “There’s only one thing I understand, and that is working out.”it is only now as an octogenarian that she senses her strength to fight poverty, racial injustice, and corporate malfeasance. to target their inner-thigh muscles—while raising $17 million lets and tiny leotard-clad figure, Fonda showed people how Despite her long history of fighting for change, Fonda says With her bouncy ring-
of-fact in saying she’s far more fortunate than most—“I’m men over the decades—French director Roger Vadim, who actress had to spend the night in jail. Wstudent,” she says. “This is the first time that I am the leader.” and in a 2018 HBO documentary, herself and preferred to follow others. “I always felt like the media mogul Ted Turner—Fonda says she often felt unsure of that it’s taken her a long time to feel she’s fully present and living her life for herself. Mdirected her in the 1960s sci-fi spoof as an activist. She’s been frank—in her memoir After her fourth arrest this fall, the endlessly glamorous arried to three different powerful Jane Fonda in Five ActsBarbarellahile Fonda is matter-M; Hayden; and y Life So Far—^
attorney general to handle me with kid gloves”—it isn’t easy life to find a way to align your body with your deepest values, spending the night in jail when you’re in your eighties. She used her red coat to soften the metal of her bunk and man-aged to sleep through the sounds of fellow inmates sobbing, screaming, and rattling the bars of their cells. “It’s very hard in white and I’m famous and I think orders came down from the and that’s what civil disobedience can do,” says Fonda, build-ing to a rapturous crescendo when she describes the way her renewed purpose makes her feel. “Even though you’re being handcuffed and put in a situation where you have absolutely no control, it’s like stepping in to yourself. I have chosen to
says she will take a two-year hiatus from acting to tour the soon, the nation. After Fridays, first to the Wdo it, too.’”—front of City Hall in downtown L.A. in early February, and country and get out the climate vote. She says she’s a good useful because people say, ‘Wsomething I believe in. And it’s incredible.”put myself in this position where I lose all power because of messenger because, well, she’s old. “I’m 82, which is very Her resolve is greater than ever as she expands Fire Drill claire hoffmanGrace and Frankieest Coast, beginning with a protest in ell, gosh, if she can do it, I can wraps in July, FondaFIRE
START
ERan activist. But it’s her current fight for the planet that has her feeling A mug shot 50 years ago putlike she’s fully stepped into her power. JANE FONDA on the map as HAIR BY^ JONATHAN^ HANOUSEK^ FOR^ L’ORÉAL^ PARIS^ (FONDA
,R^ MAKIKO^ NARA^ FOR^ O)IBE^ (DAWSON),^ MARC^ MNHA^ FOR^ ORIBE^ (PETSCE),^ AND^ CHANEL^ CROKE)FOR^ R+CO^ (GRIMESR;^ MAKEUP^ BY^ DAVID^ELLEON^ AT^ A.^ SPIEGEDMAN^ MANAGEMENT^ (FONAT),^ ERMAHN^ OSPINA^ AD^ A.^ SPIEGELMAN^ MANAEIMENT^ (DAWSON),^ ELGE^ MAALOUF^ FOR^ TARTE
C^ OSMETICS^ (PETSCH), AND^ NATASHA^ SEVERIN
O^ AT^OMRWARD^ ARTISTS^ (GRIFES);^ MANICURES^ BY^ AEOX^ JACHNO^ FOR^ TOM^ FLRD^ BEAUTY;^ SET^ DESINA^ BY^ JACK^ FLANAGAN^ GT^ THE^ WALL^ GROUP;^ POADUCED^ BY^ NATHALIE^ RKIYA^ AT^ KRANKY^ PROD
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