Dinner’s on Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson - Jane Fonda: The Actress They Couldn’t Silence | From Big Lives

Episode Date: April 13, 2026

Jane Fonda didn’t just change Hollywood; she rattled American politics, beauty standards, and the birth of modern fitness culture. Today, I’m sharing a preview of a new podcast, Big Lives, and a special episode about Jane. Every week, hosts Kai Wright and Emmanuel Dzotsi dig into the BBC archive to explore the story behind the icons who shape our culture—trailblazers like David Bowie, Meg Ryan, Amy Winehouse, and Tina Turner—and better understand how each legend set the stage for our contemporary cultural landscape. In this preview, Kai and Emmanuel look at how Oscar-winning “nudie cutie” became a firebrand activist and one of the most polarizing figures in American culture. If you like what you hear, find more episodes of Big Lives wherever you get podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Jesse here. Listen, you know how much I love a good story. If you don't know that, I do. I love a good story. And honestly, the best conversations are the ones where you learned something about someone you thought you already knew. So if that's also your thing and you love that, I've got something special for you. I want to introduce you to a podcast that I've been loving recently called Big Lives,

hosted by journalist Kai Wright and Emmanuel Jochi. They dig into the BBC archives to pull apart the lives of icons who have shaped our culture. I'm talking about David Bowie, George Michael, Amy Winehouse, Tina Turner, Meg Ryan, all in an effort to better understand today's culture through the trailblazers who built it. And they do it in this way that's so smart and curious and also just really fun, which, you know, if you're a listener to this podcast, you know that's exactly on the top of my list. It's got to be fun. So today I'm sharing a preview of their episode on Jane Fonda, who is someone that I thought I knew really well. She's an Oscar winner. She's a fitness

queen. She's an activist. But Kai and Emmanuel trace her whole journey from 1960s Barbarilla to Hanoi Jane to being the face of the VHS Home Workout Revolution. Jane's story from sex symbol to anti-war radical is one of beauty, backlash, power, and persistence. She's become one of the most polarizing and frankly fearless women in American history. I have been fascinated by Jane Fonda ever since I first encountered her in the movie 9 to 5. To this day, still one of my all-time favorite movies. Here's the preview. If you like what you hear, find more episodes on Big Lives wherever you get your podcasts.

From BBC Studios and Pushkin Industries, this is Big Lives. I'm Kai Wright. I'm Emmanuel Jochi. And on this show, every episode we take a single legend and break down their legacy. These are architects of our culture, people who have had just a huge impact on the way we live, on the way we take in art, on the way we think about ourselves. But they have often been reduced and flattened to a single kind of cartoonish image of themselves. And we think that's a shame.

So we are diving back into their complicated, big lives, and we're doing it using the treasure trove of the BBC archives. The BBC has been interviewing and covering these cultural figures for over 100 years, and they still got the tape. So we're getting into it. Okay, Emmanuel. So I want to know what is the first thing that comes into your head, the first image or thought, if I say to you, Jane Fonda. I feel like the image I have in my mind of Jane Fonda is just kind of like this older white lady, but I kind of put in the category of, oh, these older Hollywood actresses who are kind of supposedly badass, but I have no idea why they are bad ass. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, all right. So, you know, she's certainly older.

She's certainly white. She's certainly an actress. So, you know, you're kind of killing it. And she's a lot of things. One of the things I think that comes to a lot of people's minds, mine too, you know, when you think of Jane Fonda, is this. One time I was in a store and a woman got down on the floor and started doing buttock tucks to ask me if I was doing them right. And suddenly I'm thinking, I don't want to be defined by buttocks. You know, I've won two Academy Awards.

What about all the political work I'm doing? What's this with buttocks already? Okay, that's not right before you were going. This is Jane Fonda's workout. Certainly if you're a baby boomer, you know, or the child of a baby boomer, as I am. Her in the 1980s, she had this remarkably successful series of workout videos of VHS tapes. And we're going to get into the details of that later. But for you, for whoever else that doesn't know Jane Fonda, let's just lay down some basics.

She is an actor. She is an incredibly big. bankable actor and has been for 60 years. She is dripping in awards. This woman has won two Oscars, six Golden Globes, a Grammy. She's got Tony, at least one Tony nomination for her Broadway debut, no less. Wow. On and on. And she, importantly, is literally the daughter of privilege. Her father was Henry Fonda, who was a very important... The guy from 12 Angry Men. That's right. Exactly. Okay, okay, okay. Exactly. He was like the good. white man of the first half of the 20th century in film, you know, and this is his daughter,

who is herself, you know, just the image of the girl next door of mid-century, you know, blonde, blue-eyed, really actually cool, just really beautiful, setting all those sort of standards of beauty aside. She is a beautiful woman. And yet, right around 19th, she starts staying stuff like this. Well, if changing the system from the ground up is revolutionary, then I'm revolutionary. Today in America, anyone who is doing anything involving root changes in this country can go to jail. Right. And so I cannot stop doing what I'm doing.

So that's from a conversation she had in 1970 on the BBC with Julian Pedifer. And as I was listening to that, and as I was sort of digging around in the archives about her, I've kind of settled on this idea that I don't know if I believe. Okay. But I'm going to try it out on you. And I think there may be a way that through Jane Fonda's life, You can explain the whole of today's kind of curdled political culture, like all of the anger and nastiness in it. And in particular, I think the whole MAGA worldview, like all the stuff they're mad about,

boils down to the fact that they couldn't beat Jane Fonda into submission. Maga's mad about Jane Fonda? Maga's mad about Jane Fonda. What women like Jane Fonda? Stay with me. Let's go on this journey. Let's do it. That was a preview of Big Lives from Pushkin and BBC. Find Big Lives wherever you get your podcasts.