Jane Fonda was arrested Friday afternoon on the steps of the Capitol.

Rich Fury / AP

By mid-January of next year, Jane Fonda will have been arrested on the steps of the Capitol at least 14 times.

The actress has moved to D.C. to conduct a series of protests against climate change, and she expects to get arrested at every single one over the next 14 weeks. She’s calling the endeavor “Fire Drill Fridays,” and plans to center each protest around a different theme: the Green New Deal, women, oceans, and war, to name a few. The protests are meant to mirror the global student strikes against climate change, which mostly take place on Fridays.

She was arrested for the first time on Friday afternoon. Several young people joining her in the demonstration were also arrested.

Fonda is 81 years old (she’ll turn 82 during the course of the protests) and has a long history of activism in support of various causes. She was vocally supportive of the Black Panthers, and famously campaigned against the Vietnam War. She has apologized various times for a 1972 photo in which she appears seated on an enemy antiaircraft gun.

Fonda told WUSA9 that she was inspired to begin this series of protests after reading On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. The book mentions Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who has become internationally famous for her fight against climate change—Thunberg has been missing school every Friday to protest climate change outside of Swedish parliament since last August.

When Thunberg learned about climate change, “it so traumatized her that she stopped speaking and eating,” Fonda told the Post. “And when I read that it rocked me, because I knew that Greta had seen the truth. And the urgency came into my DNA the way it hadn’t before.”

Fonda now hopes to bring that sense of urgency to others. “We have to be sure that the crisis that is climate change remains front and center like a ticking time bomb,” she told WUSA9.

Each Thursday evening starting on October 17, Fonda will hold live-streamed teach-ins with experts about different topics related to climate change. On Fridays, she and a group of protesters—including some celebrity friends—will protest on the steps of the Capitol building until they are arrested.

And then they’ll do all of it again the next week.

Filed Under: climate change, jane fonda,