Why Jane Fonda almost quit an Oscar-winning role: “I was getting nervous”
“If I really cared about my career, I would never have done what I did,” Jane Fonda once said. While she was specifically talking about the time she left America to live in France, you can’t help but wonder whether this sweeping statement also applies to her broader status as a true hero of modern activism.
From a feminist perspective, Fonda is exactly that: a hero. So much so that she’s infiltrated almost every corner of pop culture, arises in countless conversations about stars with an anarchist edge, and taken pride of place in countless stories centralising the quintessential heroine. Arctic Monkeys wrote a song about her. Her characters live on in the complexities of others, challenging Hollywood’s perspective on what it means to be a woman, any kind of woman, in the current landscape.
While much of this has been achieved by taking the road less travelled, Fonda’s dedication to activism has always centred around the acknowledgement that she’ll never have the right answer, and she can only go on what she’s feeling or thinking at any given time. When it comes to her beliefs, this tenacity has often landed her in hot water, albeit the right kind that shows she’s not afraid of career setbacks if it means fighting for the cause.
When it comes to acting, this has made her an unequivocal feminist who questions everything, even her own bias. For instance, even today, we’re still debating what it means to be a feminist, and whether certain aspects of modern womanhood (sexual liberation, for instance) are progressing the movement to a more fluid, diverse mindset or setting it back some ten years or so. But where Fonda stands is that it’s all a learning curve, and there’s often no right answer.
A real turning point in both Fonda’s acting career and position as a feminist came when she was researching for her role in Klute. Playing call girl Bree Daniels was a challenge because her instinct was that it wasn’t feminist enough to play a role some could see as degrading, but a conversation with a friend quickly made her realise that it wasn’t a profession that made someone less of a woman, so long as she could play into the nuances of the character and bring complexity to the role.
“It had a profound impact on my approach to acting,” she wrote in her autobiography My Life So Far. “I had to dig deep to understand Bree, which forced me to confront parts of myself I hadn’t before.”
She also said she hadn’t been thinking about the role at first, and as it loomed closer, she “was getting nervous”. On her first day, she wondered “if it wasn’t politically incorrect” to play a call girl.
“Was a real feminist do that?” she wrote, adding: “A real feminist wouldn’t have to ask herself such a question.”
In her fervour to seek out an answer, she spoke to her friend, singer Barbara Dane, for advice: “I remember what she told me: ‘Jane, if you think you have room in this script to create a complex, multifaceted character, you should do it. It doesn’t matter that she’s a call girl, as long as she’s real.'”
In the end, that’s precisely what’s made Fonda a true pioneer of modern activism and anarchy: having the courage to stand up and actually ask for advice on what to do when the conversation seems convoluted and distorted by the overwhelming potential to do the wrong thing. And, in the end, that’s what it means to be a feminist: acknowledging you’ll never know the experiences of others, but that you can try your best to have empathy and understanding.
