-My first guest is a two-time Oscar winner
and renowned activist.
Her virtual climate movement "Fire Drill Fridays"
streams live every Friday.
Here is the one and only Jane Fonda!
[ Cheers and applause ]
Jane Fonda!
Oh, my goodness.
Thank you so much for being here.
-Thank you for having me.
-Oh, please. Whenever. We're so lucky to have you.
I -- You've -- I just said you dedicated your life to activism.
And I just want to see what went through your head
when you heard the verdict just now?
-I was so relieved, so grateful to the jury,
so grateful to those policemen
who testified against one of their own,
testified against Chauvin.
That's so important. But...
Right now, the anvil of justice is hot.
And we have to seize it and make sure that we use it
to bend the arc of history
in the direction that Martin Luther King said --
in the direction of justice.
But the most important thing as -- For me, as a white person,
we white people have to realize this isn't a zero-sum game.
You know? They get something, we lose something -- No.
When Black people can access healthcare and housing
and decent education and living wages and so forth,
it doesn't take away from us, from white people, you know?
It's --
What we don't realize is that all of us lose.
We all suffer because of racism.
Never was this more obvious than during the pandemic,
you know, when so many --
Most of the front-line workers were people of color.
And they were denied the personal protective equipment.
They were not able to stay home if they got sick
'cause they couldn't afford to.
We're all in this life together, and we have to overcome racism.
-Yeah. I agree. [ Applause ]
You've been in so many protests,
and after seeing the protests for Black Lives Matter,
what was different about this, and what stuck out?
-I think for a lot of reasons,
most of them having to do with the incident itself, you know.
It's very hard to stay in one place for nine minutes.
That guy was committed to killing George Floyd.
And we all saw it.
And so the outpourings that happened
all over the country, all over the world,
and they lasted, were more diverse than ever before.
I mean there were communities here in California
that are all white
that were marching with Black Lives Matter signs.
I think that during the pandemic,
a lot of us realized --
Many, many of us realized for the first time
how so many people, especially people of color,
are barely hanging on.
And our hearts began to open.
We began to feel empathy. We need more of that.
They were very unusual, those protests.
And I think that they've brought us to where we are now.
And now we have to keep going.
-I read an interesting quote today.
Someone said that this case
has made activists out of average citizens.
Do you agree with that?
-I hope that's true.
I hope that's true. People certainly did turn out,
across race, across age, across ability, people in wheelchairs,
men and women, across gender.
It was really, really important,
and I hope that it will continue.
'Cause we have a long way to go.
-Yeah.
Do you remember the exact moment
when you decided you wanted to become an activist?
-Yeah. It was 1968,
and I was living in Paris,
'cause I was married to a Frenchman.
And American G.I.s who had fought in Vietnam
started to teach me about the war.
And they gave me a book to read by Jonathan Schell
called "The Village of Ben Suc."
I read it in one sitting,
and by the time I was through, I was a different person.
-Is this true?
I read that in around 1970, before you won your first Oscar,
that you were -- almost decided to just stop acting
and just devote your life completely to activism?
-Yeah, I --
You know, I had become a kind of an organizer, an activist,
and my celebrity separated me
from the people that I was working with,
and...
I just -- I didn't want to do it anymore.
And this guy,
he became the mayor of Detroit at one point, Ken Cockrel.
He's a Black lawyer in Detroit, who was my mentor and my friend,
and he said, "Fonda, listen to me.
The movement has plenty of organizers.
We don't have movie stars.
You not only have to stay with your profession,
but you have to be more intentional
about how you do it."
And that's when I started to produce my own movies.
-There you go. That's what I'm talking about right there.
Absolutely. -Thank you, Ken Cockrel.
-And here we are. We're talking about "Fire Drill Fridays."
It's streaming every Friday.
Can you explain to the audience what this is
and how you came upon this?
-Well, I was motivated in the fall of 2019
by the student climate protesters globally,
the biggest protests in history.
And I knew I wasn't doing enough.
And I'm famous. I have a platform.
I've got a hit series, "Grace and Frankie."
Sure helps being an activist when you have a hit series.
-Yeah, absolutely. [ Cheers and applause ]
And so I decided to move to Washington, D.C.
It became a project of Greenpeace.
And our goal was to reach the 25 million Americans
who are alarmed about the climate crisis
but haven't done anything about it 'cause nobody's asked them.
You know? And there are apparently 13 million of them
who would engage in civil disobedience
and risk getting arrested, but nobody asked them.
So our target was the great un-asked.
And I figured, you know, I turned 82 at the time,
and I thought, "Well, they'll see this old lady
who, you know, she's getting arrested and going to jail.
Maybe they'll think, 'Well, I'm really concerned about this.
Maybe I'll do that, too.'"
And people started coming from all over the country,
mostly women, mostly older women.
-Wow.
-Washington, Oregon, everywhere. [ Cheers and applause ]
From all over.
And so when the pandemic hit, we took it online.
And, you know, in 2020,
we had 9-million-some views across all platforms.
People have really stuck with it. It's wonderful.
-And how did you come up with the name "Fire Drill Fridays"?
-Well, about five days before the very first one
in October of 2019, we still had no name.
And we'd been thinking and thinking
and trying to come up with one.
And a documentary was being made, and the sound man --
We were packing up to leave,
because we just couldn't think of a name,
and he took his earphones off,
and he said, "Well, why not call it 'Fire Drill Fridays'?"
And that was the name.
It was the sound man on the documentary crew.
-See, and it works, and it sticks in your head,
and you remember it, "Fire Drill Fridays."
-Greta Thunberg said, "We have to act like
our house is on fire," like it's a real crisis,
'cause it is. So we're the fire drill.
We're going to put out the fire.
-For someone just dipping their toe in the pool or in the water,
what would be the first thing you'd say, "Well, this is how
you can get involved to help climate change"?
-Well, the big focus right now is, um --
Us American taxpayers give money to the fossil fuel industry.
You know, that's kind of like dating a guy who beats you up,
but you keep going out with him and giving him what he wants.
You know? I mean, just think about this.
Almost 3 million people have died from COVID
over the last 15 months.
Over the same time frame, three times as many people,
8.7 million people, have died
because of fossil-fuel-related air pollution.
And we give $20 billion a year to these guys?
They are bad guys.
So one of the first things we have to do is stop --
They're called subsidies --
Stop giving subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.
So you can go to firedrillfriday.com,
and it will lead you to where you can find out how to do it,
how to take action.
Call your elected officials and President Biden
and demand that not a penny more should go to these bad guys
that are killing us and destroying our future.
-Jane Fonda, I thank you so much for not stopping
and for doing this for over 50 years.
You're amazing.