Jane Fonda might actually convince me to join TikTok.
The Hollywood legend is now a member of the viral social platform, and she did something incredible for one of her inaugural posts: revived her retro “Jane Fonda workouts,” which swept the country in the 70s and 80s.
“My name is Jane Fonda and I’m going to bring back the ‘Jane Fonda workout,’” she says on her TikTok, posted Thursday, April 2. She also put the video on IG for those who aren’t TikTokers quite yet.
See it for yourself, below:
But it looks like this might be a one-time thing. It seems Fonda did the workout to draw attention to the globe’s climate crisis. After a few leg lifts, she told her followers, “There are too many workouts happening right now, on television and on computers. What I really would like you to do is work out with me for the planet. There’s a climate crisis that’s a real emergency and so, whether you’re on your couch or your yoga mat, will you join me for the Virtual Fire Drill Fridays?”
Virtual Fire Drill Fridays, for those who don’t know, are rallies organized by Greenpeace USA and Fonda that help bring awareness to the climate change crisis and how people can help it virtually. Fonda recruited several celebs, including Piper Perabo and Marissa Tomei, to help spread the message. The drills will happen digitally every Friday in April at 2 P.M. ET.
“Join us this Friday alongside @JaneFonda and @FireDrillFriday to keep the pressure on politicians to adopt a Green New Deal, end new fossil fuels, and enact a just transition to a renewable economy that protects workers and communities,” Greenpeace USA wrote in an Instagram caption. “Let’s tackle the climate crisis together while we #StayHome. We’ll see you online!”
This is a great, important cause, but can Jane Fonda actually start teaching workouts again? That might motivate me to get off my couch!
The Oscars 2020 brought many amazing fashion and beauty moments—but one of the best came at the very end of the night as Jane Fonda walked onto the stage to present the award for Best Picture to Parasite in a dress she recycled from 2014 and striking short, gray hair.
Fonda always looks phenomenal but this may have been one of her best looks yet—and her hair color was a very conscious choice. Her colorist Jack Martin shared some of the thinking behind the decision in a lovely Instagram post.
“I had the honor and the pleasure to transform the legendary actress @janefonda hair specially for the 2020 Oscar. Spending 7 hours with this amazing Hollywood star and witnessing her energy, beauty, strength and femininity was so inspiring,” he wrote. “For straight 7 hours while I was working on her hair she was writing chapters in her due soon book, and memorizing her lines in the famous tv show Frankie and grace [sic] that she is shooting the 7th season now, answering emails and reading her newspapers plus communicating with me and her team with the sweetest, humblest soul, she made me feel ashamed to complain of being tired.”
For a woman who’s been making both political and sartorial statements for the entirety of her career, it’s powerful to see her embracing the beauty of gray hair—especially during a time when so many women are pushing back against the idea that going gray means “giving up.” According to Martin, her decision to color her hair was purely for fun, plain and simple.
“Her goal color was a silver icy blonde to surprise everyone at the 2020 Oscars,” Martin continued, before sharing the formula he used in case you’d like your own colorist to give this a go. “Jane was extremely happy for getting her dream hair that took her a while to find a colorist that can do it perfectly in a very painless process.”
Naturally, Jane Fonda’s new look had a lot of fans on social media too.
Cheers to an 82-year-old icon who continues to live life on her own terms.
In the year since 16-year-old Greta Thunberg started striking to demand action on climate change, the movement has grown fast. Young people all over the world have started walking out of school once a week to call on the grownups to do something in an action called #FridaysforFuture. And when activists talk, Jane Fonda listens.
Fonda has been an outspoken advocate for most of her life, protesting war, violence, discrimination, and now our collective inaction when it comes to saving the planet. And last month, Fonda launched her Fire Drill Fridays campaign, promising to protest in Thunberg’s spirit each Friday through the end of 2019. (It’s led to her getting arrested at the U.S. Capitol on a regular basis.)
At Glamour‘s Women of the Year Awards on November 11, Fonda continued to honor Thunberg’s example. She accepted Thunberg’s WOTY Award on the teen’s behalf as Thunberg continues to travel the United States to draw attention to the issue of climate change. With her at New York’s Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center for the occasion were activists Xiye Bastida, 17, Alexandria Villaseñor, 14, and Jade Lozada, 17. “When I saw Greta Thunberg strike for climate, I knew I had to mobilize my school and our city. Greta’s views match my own, that you take care of the Earth, and the Earth takes care of you,” Bastida said ahead of Fonda’s remarks.
Fonda delivered a passionate speech, reminding the audience of the power of activism. “I have not met Greta Thunberg, but Greta Thunberg changed my life,” Fonda said.
Fonda asked the crowd to become “warriors for the climate” on Thunberg’s behalf and take greater, bolder risks to save our planet. Read Fonda’s entire call-to-action on behalf of Greta Thunberg, below.
“I have not met Greta Thunberg, but Greta Thunberg has changed my life. I’d been feeling anxious and depressed, because I knew I wasn’t doing enough in the face of the catastrophe that is looming.
I drive an electric car. I’m stopping the use of single-use plastic in my home. I eat a lot less meat or fish. Yes, and fish, because fish stocks are plummeting because the ocean is becoming acidified and the climate is warming. These things are wonderful, they’re all very important, and we should all do them. But it’s a good place to start—it’s not a good place to stop. Because individual life choices like these can’t be scaled up in time to get us where we need to be.
But what do I do? I thought, I wondered, I asked myself in the comfort of my Beverly Hills home. And then I read about Greta.
I read that she’s on the spectrum. She has Asperger syndrome, and that means that unlike the rest of us, you see, people with Asperger see and learn things that are not clouded by the rationalizations and obfuscations of the rest of us. They don’t worry about being popular or fitting in. What they see, they see, pure and direct. And I knew that what Greta had seen was the truth.
When she realized what was happening and looked around and saw that no one was behaving like it was a crisis, it so traumatized her that she stopped speaking. When I read this, I decided that I needed to do something more than what I’d been doing.
Greta said, today we use 100 million barrels of oil every day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep the oil in the ground. And so we can’t save the world by playing by the rules, right? Right? Right? Greta knows that.
For the third consecutive Friday, Jane Fonda spent the afternoon in handcuffs. (Police zip-tied her hands, to be precise.) The 81-year-old Grace and Frankie star and longtime activist was arrested at the U.S. Capitol during a protest to bring more awareness to climate change. Fonda announced earlier this fall that she had moved to Washington, D.C. to become more active on the issue. Inspired by teen climate activist (and Glamour Woman of the Year) Greta Thunberg, Fonda launched the Fire Drill Fridays campaign and vowed to protest every Friday through the end of 2019.
“Every Friday through January, I will be leading weekly demonstrations on Capitol Hill to demand that action by our political leaders be taken to address the climate emergency we are in. We can’t afford to wait,” Fonda wrote on her website. “I will be on the Capitol every Friday, rain or shine, inspired and emboldened by the incredible movement our youth have created. I can no longer stand by and let our elected officials ignore—and even worse—empower—the industries that are destroying our planet for profit. We can not continue to stand for this.”
This week’s protest focused on saving the ocean from pollution, and Fonda was joined by The Good Place star Ted Danson, who calls Fonda his “mentor.” “When I turned 70 I thought OK, time to rest on my laurels, and then I met Jane Fonda,” Danson told the crowd. Fonda and Danson stood in solidarity with their fellow protesters and chanted “Get in motion, save our ocean,” before the police intervened. Fonda and Danson were among the 32 people reportedly arrested for unlawful demonstration.
Though Fonda was removed from the protest, her legions of fans made sure she didn’t go quietly. Many took to Twitter celebrating Fonda’s latest Fire Drill Friday—and sharing photos of her contagiously joyful mood while being escorted out. Frequent Glamour contributor Molly Jong Fast wrote, “My Charred heart explodes with adoration for adorable baby boomers getting arrested protesting the climate apocalypse.” While write R. Eric Thomas shared, “Jane Fonda’s Prison Party is a combination of my two favorite things: the stars of my youth and the unresolved question of any possible future.”
Read on for the best reactions to Fonda’s big mood, as well as her incredible work.
My very last question for Jane Fonda is rather broad: “What do you think of being deemed an icon?”
“Well,” she starts before a brief pause, “an icon is somebody that you hold up as an example to represent something. And when you mention their name people know what it is you’re talking about. And, I guess, in my case, it’s a strong, brave woman who hasn’t steered away from controversy. A woman who, more than anything, has kept going.”
Jane Fonda’s enduring tenacity—that keep goingness, even at 80—isn’t lost on me. In 2012, my own mother lost her husband, my stepfather, to a lengthy and laborious battle with liver disease and soon found herself in a particular state of limbo. Here was a woman who, after 63 years of traveling the world, raising five children (three were triplets!), becoming a successful financial advisor at Merrill Lynch, and imbuing her Arkansas community with female empowerment, was forced to put life on hold for months on end to nurse and nurture her partner of 21 years through his final days. And then, after he died, forced to renegotiate the world as a widowed woman of “a certain age.”
Some months into this new chapter I reminded Mom of a quote I’d recently unearthed by Jane Fonda. “We’re still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch. That’s the metaphor, the old metaphor: You’re born, you peak at midlife, and decline into decrepitude,” she said in a 2011 TED Talk. “A more appropriate metaphor for aging is a staircase—the upward ascension of the human spirit, bringing us into wisdom, wholeness and authenticity.”
Fonda was referring to what she dubbed her “Third Act,” the point in time when age isn’t a burden but rather a period of reinvention, reinvigoration, and, in a sense, fearlessness. Eight years later and my mother still clings to that quote as she, now at 70 and in her own Third Act, continues up her staircase, having found a whole new joy in her career in lieu of retirement, traveling internationally at least three times a year, and regularly wearing out her grandchildren with her near constant motion.
When I tell Fonda this, I can practically hear her smile on the other end of the phone. “It makes me so happy you told me that,” she says. “You know, when you’re my age, you have to continue to be an example. You can’t just say it—you have to do it. Then women like your mother will say, ‘Oh, if Jane can do it, so can I!’ It’s nice to be viewed that way at 80. At 30, if you had told me that I would live this long and be considered an icon, I would’ve told you you were out of your friggin’ mind!”
And yet, what Fonda continues to accomplish as a proud octogenarian would raise even millennial eyebrows: The fifth season of Fonda’s hit Netflix series, Grace and Frankie, which she co-leads along with Lily Tomlin, premieres in 2019; earlier this year she appeared alongside Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen in the $80+-million-grossing comedy Book Club; and, this month on HBO, Fonda stars in a documentary that looks back on both her life and nearly 60-year career. The title? Jane Fonda in Five Acts.
PHOTO: Getty Images
PHOTO: Shutterstock
Over the years Fonda, who took home two Oscars for her roles in ‘Klute’ (1971) and ‘Coming Home’ (1978), became one of Hollywood’s most impressive hyphenates.
PHOTO: Alamy
Mere minutes into the two-hour retrospective and it’s clear that Fonda has always had her own definition of a life well lived. As the daughter of famed actor Henry Fonda and socialite Frances Seymour Brokaw (who committed suicide when Fonda was just 12 years old), Fonda’s complicated relationship with celebrity didn’t bring her to her eventual craft until her early twenties. After studying art in Paris, Fonda had returned to the states, where she met legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg, who helped her channel sensitivities and insecurities into dramatic motivation. After taking Strasberg’s class, Fonda made her Broadway debut in 1960’s There Was A Little Girl, which earned her first of two career Tony nominations. An illustrious film career followed. Movies like Tall Story (1960), Cat Ballou (1965), and Barefoot in the Park (1967), with Robert Redford, established her as a bankable movie star. Barbarella (1968), directed by her first husband, french auteur director Robert Vadim, made her an international sex symbol. With meatier, more mature roles in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), Klute (1971), Julia (1977) and Coming Home (1978), she became an awards darling, receiving best actress Oscar nominations for all four, and actually taking trophies home for Klute and Coming Home.
But the late sixties and seventies also found Fonda adopting a more profound role: that of political activist. An intense critic of the Vietnam War, she began organizing anti-war efforts. And, in 1973, she married fellow activist and politician Tom Hayden. (The pair divorced in 1990.)
Her newly-ignited passion roused detractors. Fiery pro-war Americans—who deemed Fonda as nothing more than “just an actress”—bitterly turned on her. In 1972, Fonda made a visit to Hanoi in order to get a first-hand glimpse of the effects the war and was subsequently photographed smiling and laughing while sitting in a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft weapon. “That’s one of the only things from my past that still hurts me,” Fonda says, referring to the U.S. citizens who nicknamed her “Hanoi Jane.” (Fonda, in her 2005 autobiography, My Life So Far, claimed she was manipulated into taking the picture.) “The continuing of the lies—I was the victim of fake news, and it’s painful that people still believe that about me,” she says. “It also pains me because it means there are a lot of people out there that still don’t understand what the Vietnam War was really about. And that is scary. If you don’t understand, then we will do it again.”
Despite the setback, Fonda was steadfast in her advocacy while also maintaining her career as an actress. Life, it seemed, began to exist on two planes: If Fonda wasn’t starring in seminal films, she was militant in her support for everything from the Black Panther movement to Native American rights to victims of sexual abuse. “I remember when we were doing 9 to 5, she was making calls in between takes to raise money for one of [ex] Tom [Hayden]’s campaigns,” says her Grace and Frankie co-star Lily Tomlin. “Jane’s commitment is profound. If she feels like she is doing the right thing, she’s fearless.”
PHOTO: Rebecca Ponsdomenech
Fonda (right) with American labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez in 1979.
Through the decades, and long before it was trendy, Fonda figured out how to make Hollywood and activism service each other. In fact, her now-legendary ascent to aerobics guru—starting in 1982 with Jane Fonda’s Workout, which launched a home-exercise revolution—was in service to her side hustle. Over the course of her career Fonda has produced 23 workout videos (that have sold more than 17 million copies) along with five books and 13 audio tape. The success of these projects has given Fonda the freedom to further dedicate herself to causes like the Women’s Media Center, a non-profit she, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem founded in 2005 to champion women in the media through advocacy, leadership training, and original content creation. “Public speaking. Lobbying Washington—all of that is a lot easier when you have a hit behind you,” she says. “So I’m not apologizing for being a celebrity anymore. And I’m not considering stopping acting. I’m going to keep it up as long as I can because I know that helps my activism.”
And her efforts have inspired a new generation of Hollywood hyphenates. “Jane could easily just sit back and be like, ‘I made it and I can do whatever the hell I want,'” says Brooklyn Decker, who plays Fonda’s daughter in Grace and Frankie. “But she still looks to the people who aren’t being represented in this country and she says, How can I help you? She’s still fighting for people who can’t or don’t know how to fight for themselves. She understands that ‘Fonda’ is bigger than her.”
As big as the name may seem, though, it seems the Fonda Movement hasn’t yet peaked. “I am still smack dab in my third act now. I have another 10 years until the end of my third act,” she says. Indeed, this calendar year includes a push for employment reform on behalf of domestic workers and a potential 9 to 5 sequel. “I don’t know whether to call it a coda or an epilogue. But I am going to do a lot,” she says. “There’s a lot on my horizon.”
Jane Fonda in Five Acts premieres on HBO on Monday, September 24. This profile is part of a full week honoring iconic women. For more, head here.
Rashida Jones is no newcomer to social justice. She attended her first-ever protest as a teenager and, to this day, remembers what she was opposing (the Gulf War), what she felt (a sense of unity with other demonstrators), and even what she wore (her cheerleading uniform, having come straight from practice). Since then, she’s directed a Time’s Up-related video on sexual harassment in the workplace, launched a line of eyeglasses to raise money for the ACLU, and worked with the International Rescue Committee to help Syrian refugees.
Now, the actress, 42, is putting her skills to familiar use in front of (and behind) the camera with “The Last Weekend” project, a progressive coalition’s push to get people to the polls in the November midterms—and she’s doing it in a way that pokes fun at traditional celebrity PSAs that demand viewers take action.
“Hopefully we created something that people will share with each other,” Jones told Glamour in an interview ahead of Tuesday’s national “Last Weekend” kickoff. “People are fatigued. And I’m certainly fatigued of celebrity PSAs, so the joke was sort of [that] we ourselves are fatigued with our own PSA-ness.”
A still from “The Last Weekend” promo featuring Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, and Rashida Jones.
“The Last Weekend” is exactly what it sounds like: In the days before the November 6 midterms, it’s an attempt to mobilize a volunteer army to hit the phones—and the pavement—to make sure people actually show up to vote that Tuesday.
Jones, known for comic turns on Parks and Recreation, The Office, and I Love You, Man, is part of a team that’s using humor to send a message about a dead-serious subject: An election that will determine who controls Congress and what happens to women’s rights.
Working with the organization Swing Left, which wants Democrats to wrest control of the House from the GOP, Jones helped write and direct a lighthearted call to action video co-starring Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda—two women with their own history of both funny film roles and serious political engagement.
“They’ve managed to take things that can be heavy and super political and difficult to understand and create levity around it so that people can really digest it and see it,” she said in praise of Fonda and Tomlin, whose teamwork spans projects from the 1980 hit 9 to 5 to the modern-day series Grace and Frankie.
The video features the three women urging viewers to avoid becoming complacent and to not only vote, but get others to do the same by volunteering in the run-up to the election. But, there’s a comic twist.
A promo video for “The Last Weekend” project.
“I just think [that’s] how you really get people—you make them laugh… You make them see themselves in something you’re talking about. You don’t treat it with a heavy hand. You don’t make it a chore.”
That’s a point worth remembering: Non-presidential election years don’t typically get Americans voters fired up; 2014 was particularly bad when it came to turnout. Despite the marches and the hashtags, some early analyses suggested a significant percentage of voters, including the young, might not show up.
Jones knows the history of underwhelming midterm turnout, but says this year could be different: “We’ve never lived in a time like this before, where we’ve all been kind of forced into civic engagement in a really kind of new and visceral way, where every single day, [we’re] seeing the kind of deconstruction of our democracy,” she said.
“I think people now understand more about how American democracy has been set up to function — because it’s not functioning in that way.”
Rashida Jones promotes “The Last Weekend” drive.
“The Last Weekend” coalition includes groups ranging from MoveOn, Indivisible, and the Democratic Attorneys General Association to the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Latino Victory, and Resistbot. Depending on who you ask, their work might fall into the category of making “good trouble,” a phrase Jones borrows from Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis.
“The first thing with making ‘good trouble’ is exercising your right to vote,” Jones said.
“Listen, there’s a lot of reasons to be disillusioned. The country’s divided. There’s evidence of interference in our voting process. There’s so much voter suppression. There’s a lot of reasons to feel like you can’t be heard,” she said. “But there’s not enough reasons not to encourage people to push through.”
