Jane Fonda says she wasn’t recognised in jail — until she mentioned a certain co-star, that is.
Despite her Oscar-winning career and history of joining political protests, Jane recently shared on Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson’s podcast, Where Everybody Knows Your Name, that nobody during her 2019 stint behind bars in Washington, D.C., even knew who she was.
The actor had spent one night in jail after participating in a climate change protest (Ted Danson was also arrested alongside Fonda for being a part of the same protest.)
“I ended up being put some place else with a lot of other prisoners, Black women, and it was really interesting,” Jane said during the podcast episode, which was released on Wednesday.
“They could[’nt] have cared less who I was. They had far more important things to think about — and none of them had seen any of my movies.”
“Oh, Jennifer Lopez, yeah — they had seen Monster-In-Law,” she continued. “I pulled that card and they were mildly impressed, but not really. They went right back and talked about what they were dealing with, which was survival issues. It was an eye-opener, I tell you.”
Jane starred in the 2005 comedy Monster-In-Law as a wealthy matriarch determined to keep J-Lo’s character from marrying into the family.
Elsewhere on the podcast, Jane reflected on the arrest and noted how her reality was different from those she was in jail with, saying: “We’re white and we’re famous, and we will never really know what it’s like to be Black in this country or brown.”
She also discussed how her fame allowed her to have certain benefits while arrested, including a guard “stationed outside” her cell while she heard “nothing but screams” coming from “down the hall” from far less privileged inmates, who she assumed were suffering “psychotic breaks”.
“Guys are screaming and screaming and banging the doors, and you realise, ‘They should be in another kind of place,’ like a mental health place,” Jane said.
“They shouldn’t be in jail. I was the only white person there.”
Jane was arrested five times at the climate change protest in Washington.
Despite this, the 86-year-old said on the podcast that being arrested for protesting “still matters” and that there’s “something very liberating about engaging in civil disobedience” to fight for “your deepest values”.