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Put her on a ladder and it's a different story altogether.
"I'm really afraid of heights. My heart starts to beat at the mere thought of peering down any distance," admits Fonda.
"Yet it seems that every director finds at least one height scene per movie. I was freaking out the day Nick Cage and I had to film the hot air balloon ride for It Could Happen to You."
But let's get back to that mountain lake and the 20-metre crocodile.
In the horror-comedy Lake Placid, opening Friday, Fonda plays Kelly Scott, a neurotic New York paleontologist who is sent to a remote lake in Maine.
The locals insist an enormous crocodile now resides in their once-peaceful lake and is preying on anything - or anyone - who ventures in, on, or near it.
Fonda spends a good deal of the film being dumped into the lake with one of the three animatronic crocodiles built for the film.
"I'm a water baby so they had to coax me out of the lake," recalls Fonda, whose father Peter Fonda divorced her mother, Susan Brewer, when Bridget was seven.
"The house my mother bought was tiny, but it had an enormous swimming pool. We were actually living in the pool house of a former great estate home. My brother and I swam almost every day."
Brother and sister got to visit their father during summer vacation.
"With the money my father made from Easy Rider, he bought a beautiful boat and we would live on it with him whenever we'd visit."
Bridget is a third-generation Hollywood actor.
Her grandfather was the late Henry Fonda and her aunt is Jane Fonda.
"As a child, I never understood what it was my grandfather did. To me he was just this really soft-spoken man who painted pictures and made great bubble machines for us kids.
"He also raised chickens on his ranch and he would let us feed them.
"I got to visit him on the set of The Red Pony but none of it made any real sense to me."
Even when she realized most of her family members were famous actors, Bridget had no intention of following in their footsteps.
"I was painfully shy, so when I got to high school and joined the drama society it was to work backstage. My grandfather had taught me arts and crafts so I painted sets and built props."
Finally the inevitable thing happened. Bridget got cast in the small role of the nurse in the comedy Harvey.
"It was a play my grandfather had done on stage and it was such a small role I figured I could carry it off without too much panic."
Once she'd experienced the roar of the crowd and the smell of grease paint, Bridget was hooked and naturally received encouragement, advice and warnings about the profession.
Nobody warned the aspiring actress about starring in horror films. Even if they did, it wouldn't have mattered.
"I've loved horror films since I was a child. My favourite was The Giant Behemoth.
"I remember when I was eight and my brother was six we watched The Haunting, huddled with my mother in her bed.
"I love the fact that with Lake Placid we're setting out to scare an audience. Because it's a David E. Kelley script, there's also a great deal of subversive humour."
Last year, Fonda ended her seven-year relationship with actor Eric Stolz. She is currently dating country singer Dwight Yoakam, who is making his writing-directing debut with the western South of Heaven, West of Hell.
"It's actually a gothic western and it's finished. It could be out this fall or next spring. I have a small role and that's all I'm saying about Dwight. We've agreed not to talk about our relationship."
Fonda is currently filming Monkey Bone with Brendan Fraser and Whoopi Goldberg.