Jane Fonda is opening up her ongoing battle with self-acceptance.
The 82-year-old actress covers Elle Canada's March 2020 issue, and in the accompanying interview, talks frankly about how being in show business has affected her when it comes to how she judges her own physical appearance. Fonda calls all the recent red carpet glam a "total facade."
"I hate it because it is so uncomfortable," she says.
Fonda then brings up the plastic surgery question herself and says she's done with going under the knife. Fonda memorably feuded with Megyn Kelly in September 2017 after Kelly asked her about her plastic surgery on-air. In September 2018, she did talk candidly about the fact that she's had work done in her HBO documentary, Jane Fonda in Five Acts, and said she "hated" that she felt the need to undergo plastic surgery and wished she was "braver."
"I can't pretend that I'm not vain, but there isn't going to be any more plastic surgery -- I'm not going to cut myself up anymore," Fonda now tells Elle about her current outlook. "I have to work every day to be self-accepting; it doesn't come easy to me."
"I try to make it very clear that it has been a long and continuing struggle for me," she continues. "I post pictures of me looking haggard -- and once with my tooth out! This is a fake tooth [taps at an incisor]. It came out in a restaurant in Portugal, and I posted it."
These days, Fonda also very much values her female friendships after leaning into masculine role models almost her entire life.
"The people who tend to really show up for me -- and whom I show up for -- are my women friends," she notes. "I grew up in the '50s, and on top of that my mother killed herself, so I totally identified with men, which meant rugged individualism, so it was very hard for me to overcome that."
"I grew up at a time when the thinking was that women were like cats, competing with each other, knocking each other down," she adds. "But, in fact, there is no limit to what we can accomplish if we work together. What this time in human history calls for is collective action. And women are the most receptive to the idea of collective action. For evolutionary reasons, we are less susceptible to individualism. And in a way it's our saving grace and it’s our strength."
And clearly, her passion for battling climate change is never far from her mind.
"Nothing good ever happened without mass movement -- and we need a mass movement now to focus on climate," she says.
ET spoke to Fonda in November, when she talked about continuing to protest climate change in Washington, D.C. and being arrested for it multiple times.
"[We're] trying to save the planet, save humanity," she said. "The scientists tell us we have 11 years to do something that is incredibly difficult, which is to try to slow down climate change. It's affecting every aspect of our lives and of the planet."
"It doesn't matter about the arrest," she added. "What matters is getting the word out to people and engaging in civil disobedience, because this is what's going to be more and more necessary. Everybody's gotta get used to this new normal, getting beyond our comfort zone and not acting as business as usual anymore. Risking a little bit more, because there's so much at stake."
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