Fed up with being offered “sad” roles not worthy of her decades’ experience on the silver screen, Hollywood superstar Jane Fonda has turned her attention to the stage as herself.

The two-time Academy Award winner and long-time activist and human rights campaigner will dish on life both on and off-screen when she headlines In Conversation With Jane Fonda at the upcoming Wanderlust True North Series this month.

Known for her openness and honesty despite the many difficulties she’s faced throughout her illustrious career, Fonda remains vibrant and full of energy and says she feels younger and healthier than ever at 87.

Her secret to wellbeing lies in a combination of nature, meditation, and therapy.

Fonda has also addressed the topic of cancel culture, expressing her indifference to being black-listed at this stage in her life.

Here, Jonathon Moran sits down with the living legend.

JMo: Jane Fonda, you legend, how are you?

JF: I don’t feel like a legend right now, but I’ll take it.

JMo: In my mind, you’re just phenomenal. You are on your way for Wanderlust True North this month, what are we going to see when you get up on stage?

JF: I can’t wait. I’m so excited. I love going to Australia. I just talk a lot. I’m gonna be funny. I learned to be funny with the 10 years married to Ted Turner. He is the funniest person I know and pretty outrageous. It gave me permission to just be myself and let go. People will get good entertainment and some good information that they probably didn’t know before.

JMo: I love that you’re so open and honest in a Hollywood world in particular that is so guarded.

JF: I don’t tell everything, Jonathon, but I try to tell what I think would be helpful for people or that would amuse people, and things that they can learn. People are usually quite happy with my events, and I do a lot of them. I’m not working on a movie right now, so I come to Australia to entertain people.

JMo: Between work?

JF: I hope it is between work, the industry is in real trouble. I’m 87, I don’t feel done yet. Roles that I’m offered are really sad. They are not worthy of my six decades of being in this industry so I’m not working and I come to Australia to make some talks, to entertain people.

JMo: What sort of roles are you being offered that are sad?

JF: Oh, it’s the kooky grandmother, or the dying mother with dementia. They’re usually stereotypes. People have so many stereotypes of older people. I’m 87, and I feel younger and healthier and a greater sense of wellbeing than I had in my 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s.

JMo: You look phenomenal. I can feel your energy.

JF: Inside and out, I don’t know about phenomenal, but I’m happy. Isn’t that strange when everything is so horrible in the world? I think one of the greatest things that we can attain is a robust sense of wellbeing, of happiness. To be happy when it is not a happy situation that you are living in, it is good. I am happy but I am more aware than most people of what is really happening in the world, what we’re facing and the dire consequences if we don’t act quickly, which we probably won’t do because of who we just elected. You guys did better with your election I think.

JMo: Just jumping back for a second, what I love about you is you emanate wellbeing. It’s so much deeper than just slapping on face cream.

JF: So many women come up to me and say things, like Rihanna. About six years ago I passed her at the Grammys and she said: ‘I want to be you when I grow up’. And I think to myself, but you have no idea what I did to get to be this kind of person that you want to be. What I think it takes, although I have to think about it more, it requires someone to be aware of their shortcomings, of their weaknesses, of their bad tendencies, and be determined to become better. I grew up with not a great sense of myself and I was not what I wanted to be, and I’ve spent my whole life in various ways trying to be better and trying to use the qualities that I have. I came from a long line of really depressed people. Like half my family and my grandparents and my great grand suffered from bipolar, and my mother killed herself when I was 12. I mean, it was a depressed group of people. I was a depressed person. I was a glass half-empty person for a long time, and I have worked hard to become something different.

JMo: What did you have to do?

JF: It’s a combination of a lot of things, including spending a lot of time in nature. I meditate, and I meditate in nature when I can. I am not one of those people who’ve been in therapy for 50 years but I have been in therapy, and I am in therapy now. I went into therapy at 87 to figure out why I had three divorces, what was my role in that, why I have a hard time in relationships, things like that. One reason I’m so happy right now is because I’m single. I have had the most extraordinary experiences all through my life but it is not having experiences that make you wise, but understanding the meaning of those experiences, what your role has been in them and what they mean. One of the ways that I’ve done that is to write about them. One of the reasons that I wrote a memoir was because I wanted to understand my experiences and I advocate for people to write what I call a life review. You don’t have to get it published. It doesn’t have to be a proper book but, at some point, there is huge value in going back over your life. Not, I did this and then I did that, but what really happened? How did I feel? Those types of questions. One of the most important things you can do is to try to understand your parents and what made them the way they were, which means you have to understand your grandparents and how they raised your parents. It requires a lot of research and talking to people, separately, not together, because they lie if they are together. Mother and father separately, grandmother and grandpa separately if they are still alive. Mine were all dead when I wrote my life review but cousins, friends, ex-lovers. It shows you a lot because all parents make terrible mistakes and what we need to know is, and what we usually find out when you end up doing a life review, is it had nothing to do with you.

JMo: My book – Mental As Anyone: A Toolkit for Surviving and Thriving on the Chaotic Rollercoaster of Life – comes out on June 25. It’s a memoir-meets-self-help. I’m terrified but proud.

JF: If you really tell everything that feeds into what made you you, including the abuse, that’s when it becomes valuable to the reader. If you don’t tell your truth, there’s no value to it.

JMo: Which is maybe why you are so beloved. I see you as a warrior woman who has paved the way for so many of us.

JF: What warriors do is they take their wounds and turn them into fierceness, and they become fighters, they are the best fighters of all. If you’ve had a cushy life, everything’s been given to you on a silver platter and so forth, maybe you don’t have too much to teach anybody, but if you’ve been through the fire, even though I’m white and privileged and famous and all those things, a large part of what made me me were the scars. God comes to us through our wounds and scars, not through our trophies and awards. I needed to understand those wounds.

JMo: And do you understand them now?

JF: Yeah, I’ve spent my life trying to understand them. I’ve put in a lot of time. I was sexually abused, and so I have read every single book about sexual abuse and how you heal from it and what it means and all of that. Whenever I’m scared of something, like I was scared of getting older when I was 40, so I wrote a book about it, which required me to research. And so I put my arms around old age, and it became my best friend.

JMo: With that in mind, me speaking my truth and you speaking yours, do you worry about being cancelled or cancel culture in the world we are in today?

JF: At 87, so they cancel me. I have been cancelled so many times, and I come back – they are in jail or dead and I come back. The only thing I do hold back on is, I gave a commencement speech at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. It is a relatively conservative school. The last time I spoke there in 1972, I was hung in effigy and I told them that. Times change, the people that we once think are bad guys, we realise, they were fighting for something good. Anyway, what I did not want to do is I didn’t want to offend the people there, the parents and the kids who voted for (Donald) Trump unnecessarily. There are millions of people who voted for him that are having buyer’s remorse and we have to welcome them into our tent so I didn’t want to alienate those people so I’m careful in that sense.

JMo: You’re a strong, amazing woman. What does the future look like for you work-wise? We want you to work here.

JF: What is it about your country? There must be something in the water that turns out such talent. The people you send over here are so bloody gifted. You’ve got magic somewhere. Hugh Jackman, Cate Blanchett and Nicole (Kidman).

Jane Fonda will speak at Wanderlust True North events in Melbourne and Sydney, presented by Chemist Warehouse and L’Oreal Paris. Melbourne: The Plenary, June 12. Sydney: ICC Sydney, June 15. Tickets available here: https://wanderlust.com.au/events/jane-fonda