Actress Julia Roberts told her audience to “breathe in all that hope” and “breathe out all that fear” in an appearance at the “Rise Up, Sing Out” concert for the First Amendment on Sunday.
“We all feel like ‘I can’t turn the news on, I don’t want to hear it,’” the Pretty Woman star said. “But we have to hear it; we have to face it. But if we keep inhaling and exhaling, we will prevail.”
Roberts appeared alongside several other Hollywood celebrities at the New York City event, which counterprogrammed President Donald Trump’s Freedom 250 UFC match at the White House. The Committee for the First Amendment hosted the event, with the anti-Trump advocacy organizations No Kings and Indivisible listed as partners.
Roberts wore a T-shirt under her blazer with Jane Fonda’s face on it. Fonda, who was a master of ceremonies at the event, relaunched the Committee for the First Amendment last year. Her father, the quintessential Hollywood everyman Henry Fonda, founded the committee in 1947 in response to the rise of political blacklists in his industry.
The younger Fonda gained the moniker “Hanoi Jane” after posing for photographs atop a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft cannon in 1972.
Roberts and Fonda were joined onstage by two-time Oscar winner Robert De Niro. “Welcome to all of you who couldn’t get tickets to the White House cage fight,” De Niro quipped.
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“When I hear something I don’t like, I use my own free speech to respond,” the longtime Martin Scorsese collaborator said. “Let me give you an example: when I hear Trump say, as he did a few days ago, ‘I don’t care about Americans’ financial situation, not even a little bit,’ I say, ‘Shut the f*** up.’”
De Niro’s retort came in response to a May statement in which Trump said that the “financial situation” of voters was not motivating him to end the war with Iran.