Jane Fonda was the main attraction on the opening night of the TCM Classic Film Festival, not counting the ostensible honoree of the evening, the late Robert Redford, who costarred with her in the film that was about to be shown, 1967’s “Barefoot in the Park,” along with three other pictures. Fonda testified to her frequent costar’s unflagging integrity, but also did not avoid the elephant in the room that was Redford’s physical appearance — admitting that she had a crush, apparently unrequited, over the more than 50-year span they worked together.
“He was meant to be in movies,” Fonda told interviewer Ben Mankiewicz Thursday night at the TCL Chinese gala. “He was a brilliant movie star. He also was the most gorgeous human being I had ever been with. He was very smart and he was really funny. He loved practical jokes, and he was reckless. Not so reckless that he would have an affair with me…”
TCM Host Ben Mankiewicz and Jane Fonda speak during the 2026 TCM Classic Film Festival Opening Night Screening of “Barefoot In The Park” at TCL Chinese Theatre IMAX on April 30, 2026 in Hollywood, California.
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She explained his rather interesting way of spurning what seemed like an advance on her part. “I met him on ‘The Chase’ [their first film together, in 1966] and, oh my God… I mean, we were both married, and I asked him, ‘Do you ever have affairs?’ And he had this weird answer. He said, ‘Well, if I was gonna have an affair, it would be with somebody that was like a hooker.’”
Fonda said she took what she could get from Redford, which, at the time, was bonding over stones — “not the Rolling Stones” — but “rocks. He was married to Lola, who was studying to be an architect… Bob was in Hollywood to make this movie with me, but he really wanted to be in Utah building stone walls. And I was married to a Frenchman, and I had just built a house out in the country and I was building stone walls. And so we had such a good time talking about stacking stones.”
Their second film, “Barefoot in the Park,” did have Neil Simon’s dialogue halt for massive amounts of snogging between the two leads, as the audience at the Chinese would shortly see and whistle about. “I remember being in the bed. We were supposed to be really cold, which gave an excuse to roll up against him. … I have such a crush on him. I mean, I was looking at the last little scene of us from ‘Electric Horsemen’ [in the introductory montage], and we were standing there and I kept trying to grab his hand. Dd anybody notice that? Anything,” she added, to laughter, summing up what she was willing to take from Redford, physically. “In the last one we did together [2017’s “Our Souls at Night”], we were in bed together all the time. But nothing.”
Nearly at the outset of the conversation with the TCM host, Fonda brought up the subject of the recent tribute to Redford on the Oscars telecast, and the widely reported remark she made about wishing she’d been asked to do it. (Talking with Entertainment Tonight on a Vanity Fair red carpet that night, she discussed how she was “always in love with him” and added, ““I want to know, how come Streisand was up there doing that for Redford? She only made one movie with him. I made four! I have more to say.”)
Fonda said Thursday that no one should have taken that too seriously. “They didn’t ask me to do the Oscars, (but) Barbra came on this Oscar thing to honor Bob, and I was on the press line and I thought I was being funny. I said, ‘Well, why did they ask her? I had four movies with him.’ But actually I thought it was fabulous that they had Barbra out there, because that was a such an iconic movie, and the song was so incredible.”
As much as she revered Redford, Fonda acknowledged he had one bad habit. “The thing about him is that he’s always two or three hours late, even when he’s producing the movie. And so what was going to be a two-month film, ‘Electric Horseman,’ took six months. And a lot of that was spent in Vegas. And women would see him and, I mean, run to him and faint at his feet. It was incredible; I had never seen anything like it. And it made him so uncomfortable. So it was hard for him to be a movie star. But he liked the power it gave him, because he was able to do Sundance.
“He was just getting the idea for it when we did ‘Electric Horseman’ — we did that in ‘78 and he started Sundance in ‘81, so I kind of saw the approach to it. He didn’t like the way movies (were made) in Hollywood. They decided on what to do depending on whether it was commercial or not. And I remember both of us started off at about the same time. It was a time when it was like, ‘Don’t get any movie in the snow, because it won’t work.’ ‘Don’t make any Westerns’ — they weren’t doing well — you know, that kind of thing. He wanted to make films that had nuance and diversity…”
Fonda reeled off a list of filmmakers who came up as part of the Sundance Institute’s programs, including two who were sitting side by side in the Chinese, Alexander Payne and Jason Reitman. “And I mean, the amount of people that he trained… like, 60% of them were women, and many, many, many directors of color. He wanted diversity, he wanted complexity, he wanted surprises. And you know, he could have built an empire — and he built a nest for artists to feel safe.
“Here’s another thing that I bet you didn’t know. He didn’t ask Hollywood for a penny to pay for it. He wrote a check every year out of his own pocket.
Jane Fonda at the TCM Classic Film Festival opening night presentation of “Barefoot in the Park” held at TCL Chinese Theatre on April 30, 2026 in Los Angeles, California.
JC Olivera/Variety
In a discussion of Redford’s most loved films, “The Natural” came up, and Fonda admitted, “I hated watching him kiss Glenn Close,” leading Mankiewicz to joke that Fonda should be sure to come by Close’s handprint ceremony on Friday and share that in person.
Fonda got topical for a few moments. “When I look at what’s happening in this town, when I look at the pending mergers, for example, if that goes through, we’re gonna lose what Bob was trying to do. We have to fight. I want to fight in the spirit of Robert Redford.”
(When a Paramount logo subsequently appeared at the beginning of the “Barefoot in the Park” audience, there was a bit of tittering among the audience, no doubt due to what Fonda had been bringing up minutes earlier.)
Fonda said she and her costar had similar inclinations to take stands. “We had that in common,” she said. “The way we acted, that was different. I would go there in person and get in trouble, and he would help in other ways. He was way more sophisticated than I was about that.”
As they were about to stand up and make way for the “Barefoot” screening to begin, Mankiewicz said, “Nobody stays to watch the movie. Jane is staying to watch the movie.”
“I want to look at him some more,” she explained. But, of course, as the screening unspooled, it became evident, again, that putting Redford and Fonda in a film together was tantamount to doubling up on thirst traps.
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