Truth about Sharon Stone's iconic Basic Instinct scene revealed
Sharon Stone is no Hollywood Karen.
Never afraid to speak her mind or seek fair compensation for her work, Stone, 67, has been in the headlines for her criticism of Hollywood's pay gap.
In a resurfaced 2023 interview with Deadline, Stone revealed how she is still offered far less money than her male co-stars, despite being a world-famous star.
'Thirty years ago, when I did Basic Instinct, Michael Douglas made $14 million and I made $500,000,' she told Deadline. 'Last year, there was a $100 million film being made by a studio, and the actor, who was new, was going to be paid something like $8 million or $9 million – someone we don't really know – and the studio offered me again $500,000 to be the female lead. 'And I thought, 30 years later this is still happening. So, I don't think it has changed much.'
Making Basic Instinct wasn't an ego-boosting experience for Stone. In her autobiography, The Beauty Of Living Twice, she described the humiliation of the producer constantly calling her 'Karen' and being reminded she was the 'thirteenth choice' for the role of Catherine Tramell. Plus, Stone was duped into filming the movie's infamous leg-crossing scene, only discovering she had exposed herself at a screening.
'That was how I saw my vagina-shot for the first time, long after I'd been told: 'We can't see anything – I just need you to remove your panties, as the white is reflecting the light, so we know you have panties on,'' she wrote. 'Yes, there have been many points of view on this topic, but since I'm the one with the vagina in question, let me say: The other points of view are bullsh*t … It was me and my parts up there.'
Describing herself as the 'the last of the sex symbols' in an interview with the BBC, Stone explained how her Basic Instinct fame has been a double-edged sword. On one hand it put her on the map in Hollywood and gave her a platform to raise money for AIDS charities, but it also came at a huge personal cost. Appearing on Bruce Bozzi's Table For Two podcast, Stone said her groundbreaking performance was weaponised against her during a custody battle with her ex-husband Phil Bronstein.
'The judge asked my child – my tiny little boy, 'Do you know your mother makes sex movies?' Like, this kind of abuse by the system – that I was considered what kind of parent I was, because I made that movie,' she reflected on losing custody of her eldest adopted son Roan.
Throughout her 30+ years in the spotlight, Stone has struggled with her femme fatale image.
Far from being a sex siren, before Basic Instinct Stone insists she was 'still shy and introverted', and had to be coaxed into embracing a more sexually confident persona.
'Chuck, my manager at the time, had told me that no one would hire me because everyone said I wasn't sexy,' she wrote. 'I wasn't, as they liked to say in Hollywood at the time, 'f**kable'.' All that changed after Basic Instinct, and the line between Stone herself and her character became blurred for many in the industry.
On Louis Theroux's podcast, Stone divulged that producer Robert Evans had asked her to have sex with her Sliver co-star Billy Baldwin to save the film from being a flop. '[Evans is] running around his office in his sunglasses, explaining to me that he slept with Ava Gardner and I should sleep with Billy Baldwin, because if I slept with Billy Baldwin, Billy Baldwin's performance would get better,' Stone remembered. 'And we needed Billy to get better in the movie, because that was the problem.' Stone refused. And was painted as the villain of the Sliver set by Evans, who told everyone she had the charm of a barracuda.
It all became part of the enduring narrative that Stone is demanding. There was talk she'd pulled a gun on a Basic Instinct cameraman to warn: 'If I see one ounce of cellulite on the screen, you're a dead man.'
Then she was painted as greedy for taking producers of the sequel to court. And in his gossip-laden autobiography, Red Carpets And Other Banana Skins, Rupert Everett moaned how Stone had kept cast and crew waiting on the set of their 2004 film A Different Loyalty.
While unapologetic about being a strong woman in Hollywood, surviving a catastrophic stroke has given Stone fresh perspective. In a candid speech at the Women's Brain Health Initiative panel in 2017, she described how the life-threatening brain injury – which, she was told, only had a 1 per cent survival rate – made her re-evaluate a lot of things. 'I had lost my marriage, lost custody of my child, lost my place in line in the business, lost all my money because I was paying so many different things,' she detailed. '[I was] scraping by. I know what it's like to go through a situation where you are the top, top, top of your field, to [be] absolutely wiped out.'
Celebrate Stone's return from the brink with a watch of these seminal roles. The Quick And The Dead: Stone joins gunslinging Oscar-winners Russell Crowe, Gene Hackman and Leonardo DiCaprio in this under-appreciated Western directed by Sam Raimi.
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