Jane Fonda was honored with the Life Achievement Award at the annual SAG Awards in Los Angeles last night. The actress and activist took the opportunity to encourage her fellow actors to “resist” and reminded the audience of the importance of empathy.

Looking back on her storied career, Fonda said, “I love acting. We get to open people’s mind to new ideas, make them beyond what they understand of the world and help them laugh when things are tough, like now. For a woman like me who grew up in the ’40s and ’50s when women weren’t supposed to have opinions and get angry, acting gave me a chance to play angry women with opinions, which as you know is a bit of a stretch for me.”

She continued, “I’m a big believer in unions — they have our backs. They bring us into community and they give us power. Community means power. This is really important right now when workers’ power is being attacked and community is being weakened. SAG-AFTRA is different than most other unions. Us, the workers, we actors, we don’t manufacture anything tangible, what we create is empathy. Our job is to understand another human being so profoundly that we can touch their souls, we know why they do what they do, we can feel their joy and their pain.”

Fonda explained of the craft, “While you may hate the behavior of your character, you have to understand and empathize with the traumatized person you’re playing, right? Thinking Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice. Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke and by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people. Back to empathy, a whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming out way. And even if they’re of a different political persuasion we need to call upon our empathy and not judge but listen from our hearts and welcome them into our tent because we are going to need a big tent to resist successfully what’s coming at us.”

The actress described making her first movie during “the tail end of McCarthyism” as Hollywood resisted. She asked the audience if they had ever watched a documentary about a great social movement and wondered what they would do in that situation.

“We don’t have to wonder anymore because we are in our documentary moment, this is it and it’s not a rehearsal,” she said. “This is it, and we mustn’t for a moment kid ourselves about what’s happening. This is big time serious folks, so let’s be brave. This is a good time for a little Norma Rae or Karen Silkwood or Tom Joad. We must not isolate. We must stay in community. We must help the vulnerable. We must find ways to project an inspiring vision of the future.”

The Life Achievement Award is SAG-AFTRA’s highest honor. It is given to people who foster “the finest ideals of the acting profession,” according to SAG.