Jane Fonda was the star of the opening night of the TCM Classic Film Festival, with the exception of the night’s ostensible honoree, her late 1967 Barefoot in the Park co-star Robert Redford. The other three photographs were also taken in 1967. Fonda attested to the unwavering integrity of her frequent co-star Redford, but she also didn’t shy away from the elephant in the room being Redford’s appearance. During the more than 50 years they worked together, she admitted that she had an unrequited love that was clearly unrequited.
“He was going to be in the movie,” Fonda told interviewer Ben Mankiewicz at the TCL China Gala Thursday night. “He was a great movie star. He was also the most gorgeous human being I’ve ever been around. He was very smart and really funny. He loved pranks and was reckless. He wasn’t reckless enough to have a relationship with me…”
TCM hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Jane Fonda speak at the 2026 TCM Classic Film Festival Opening Night Screening of “Barefoot in the Park” held at TCL Chinese Theater IMAX on April 30, 2026 in Hollywood, California.
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She described his rather interesting ways of thwarting any seeming advances from her side. “I met him on ‘The Chase’ (our first film together in 1966) and lo and behold…I mean, we were both married, but I said to him, ‘Have you ever had an affair?’ and he gave me this strange answer: ‘If I was going to have an affair, it would be with some kind of prostitute.’
Fonda said she took what she could get from Redford. Back then, they bonded over stones — not “The Rolling Stones,” but “Stones.” He was married to Laura, who was studying to be an architect…Bob was in Hollywood with me to make this movie, but he really wanted to build a stone wall in Utah. And I was married to a Frenchman, and we had just built a house in the country, and we were building stone walls. So we had a very pleasant conversation, he said. About piling stones. ”
In the second film, Barefoot in the Park, Neil Simon’s dialogue was interrupted due to a large amount of snorting between the two leads, which would immediately have Chinese audiences whistle at it. “I remember being in bed and we were supposed to be so cold that he gave me an excuse to curl up with him. … I’m so in love with him. I mean, I was like our best friend in ‘The Electric Horsemen’ (in the opening montage). “I was watching the little scene after, and we were standing there and I kept trying to grab his hand. Did anyone notice? Anything,” she added, eliciting laughs and summarizing what she wanted to receive from Redford. Physically. “The last song we did together (2017’s ‘Our Souls at Night’) we were in bed together the whole time, and nothing happened.”
Almost at the beginning of her conversation with the TCM hosts, the 88-year-old Fonda, as vibrant as she was on screen in “Barefoot” in her 20s, brought up the topic of her recent Oscar telecast tribute to Redford and her widely reported remarks that she wished she had been asked to do it. (In a conversation with Entertainment Tonight on the Vanity Fair red carpet that night, she talked about how she “always loved him,” adding, “I want to know, why did Streisand do that for Redford? She only made one movie with him, and I made four! I have more to say.”)
Fonda said Thursday that no one should have taken it too seriously. “They didn’t ask me to do the Oscars,[but]Barbra came to work on this Oscar to honor Bob. I was in the press line and I thought they were joking. I said, ‘That’s it. So why did they hire her? I made four movies with him.”But I actually thought it was great to have Barbra, because it was such an iconic movie and the song was great.”
While Fonda respected Redford, she also acknowledged that he had some bad habits. “His problem is that he’s always two or three hours late, even when he’s making a movie. So the movie “The Electric Horseman,” which was supposed to take two months, took six months, and he spent a lot of that time in Las Vegas. And the women saw him, and I mean, they ran up to him, and they laid at his feet. It was incredible. I had never seen a movie like this before. And that made him very uncomfortable. But he loved it, because it gave him the power to go to Sundance.
“When we made ‘The Electric Horseman,’ he was just coming up with the idea. We made it in 1978 and he started Sundance in ’81, so I kind of understood the approach to it. I didn’t like the way the picture was made. They decided what to do depending on whether it was commercial or not. And I remember we both started at about the same time. At the time we were like, ‘Don’t shoot any movies in the snow.’ “Don’t make westerns” — westerns weren’t doing well — you know, things like that. He wanted to make a film with nuance and diversity…”
Fonda listed a list of filmmakers named as part of the Sundance Institute program. Among them were two Chinese nationals sitting next to each other, Alexander Payne and Jason Reitman. “So the number of people he trained… 60% of them were women, so many directors of color. He wanted diversity, he wanted complexity, he wanted surprise. And you know, he could have built an empire, but he built a nest where artists felt safe.
“Here’s another thing you probably don’t know: He didn’t ask Hollywood for a penny for it. He cut a check out of his own pocket every year. He cut a check out of his own pocket every year.
Jane Fonda attends the “Barefoot in the Park” presentation during the TCM Classic Film Festival Opening Night held at the TCL Chinese Theater on April 30, 2026 in Los Angeles, California.
JC Olivera/Variety
When The Natural came up during a discussion of Redford’s most beloved movies, Fonda admitted that she “hated watching him kiss Glenn Close,” and Mankiewicz joked that Fonda should be at Close’s handwriting ceremony on Friday to share the news in person.
Fonda has become a bit of a hot topic. “If you look at what’s going on in this town, the pending merger, for example, if that happens, we’re going to lose what Bob was trying to do. We have to fight. I want to fight in the spirit of Robert Redford.”
(Later, when the Paramount logo appeared at the beginning of the audience for “Barefoot in the Park,” there was a bit of a buzz among the audience, no doubt because of what Fonda had been talking about a few minutes earlier.)
Fonda said she and her co-stars have a similar tendency to take a stand. “We had something in common,” she said. “The way we acted was different. If I went there directly and got into trouble, he would help me in a different way. He was much more sophisticated than I was in that respect.”
As Mankiewicz stood up to make way for the screening of “Barefoot” to begin, he said, “No one stays to see the movie. Jane stays to see the movie.”
“I want to see how he’s doing a little bit more,” she explained. But, of course, as the screening progressed, it became clear once again that having Redford and Fonda in the movie together was tantamount to doubling down on the thirst trap.
