Jane Fonda’s powerful acceptance speech derailed by sound issues at 2025 SAG Awards

‘I can conjure up voices,’ actor joked. Jane Fonda’s Lifetime Achievement award acceptance speech was marred by technical issues at the 2025 SAG Awards. The Grace and Frankie star, 87, was honoured for her decades-long career at this year’s ceremony, which was hosted by Kristen Bell and live-streamed on Netflix on Sunday night (23 February).

Fonda used her time on the mic to deliver a powerful message of hope and unity to the A-listers in the room, telling them: “We must not isolate, we must stay in community, we must help the vulnerable”. However, the sound system struggled to pick up the Coming Home star’s voice, with a portion of her speech interrupted by a voiceover announcement saying, “Here at the 31st,” before it was cut off.

Fonda was undeterred by the bizarre technical glitch, telling the audience: “SAG-AFTRA is different than most other unions. Because us, the workers, we actors, we don't manufacture anything tangible. “What we create is empathy. Our job is to understand another human so profoundly that we can touch their souls. We know why they do what they do. We feel their joys and their pains.”.

When the voiceover then boomed over the speakers, Fonda added: “And, I can conjure up voices.”. Elsewhere in her speech, the Oscar winner made a thinly veiled dig at Donald Trump with a nod to Sebastian Stan, who plays the president in The Apprentice.

“Though you may hate the behaviour of your character, you have to understand and empathise with the traumatised person you’re playing,” she said. “Empathy is not weak or ‘woke.’ And, by the way, ‘woke’ just means you give a damn about other people,” Fonda continued.

“A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way. And even if they are of different persuasion we need to call upon our empathy and listen with our hearts and welcome them into our tent. Because we are going to need a big tent to resist successfully what is coming at us,” she said.

“We must find ways to project an inspiring vision of the future.”. As well as her decades-long career on stage and screen, Fonda is well-known for her civil rights activism, having been vocal on issues including gender equality, anti-war and the global climate crisis.

In October 2019, Fonda was arrested five times for protesting outside the United States Capitol for a reduction in the use of fossil fuels. The star later revealed in her 2020 book What Can I Do?: My Path from Climate Despair to Action, she was treated with privilege in jail because of her race and career.