A couple of days before our interview, in tardy July, Sharon Stone announced on Instagram that her mother had died. When we meet over video link, I e
A couple of days before our interview, in tardy July, Sharon Stone announced on Instagram that her mother had died. When we meet over video link, I express my sympathies. Stone is known for her straight talking, but now she outdoes herself. “Mom, Dot, actually died a few months ago, but I was only ready to tell the public about it now because I always get my mad feelings first when people die.” What kind of mad, I ask – grief, confusion, loss? She smiles. “A little bit of anger and a little bit of ‘I didn’t fucking need you anyway’, you know!”
Now she’s laughing. “My mom wasn’t of a sunny disposition. She was hilarious, but she said terrible things to me. Dot swore like a Portuguese dock worker.” Which takes us to her mother’s final days. “She said: ‘I’m going to kick you in the cunt,’ to me probably 40 times in the last five days. But that was her delirium. And when the last thing your mother says to you before she dies is: ‘You talk too much, you make me want to commit suicide,’ and the whole rooms laughs, you think: that’s a hard one to go out on, Mom! But that’s how she was. This lack of ability to find tenderness and peace within herself.”
Stone doesn’t do miniature talk. The actor, who became a household name with the 1992 erotic thriller Basic Instinct, is here to chat about her novel film, Nobody 2, but the movie is going to have to wait. Stone talks about what she wants to talk about and today family dysfunction has top priority. To be fair, this makes sense – its impact has dominated much of her life, despite being hidden from the public until her 2021 memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice.
That was when she revealed her maternal grandfather was a violent abuser and a paedophile. She said there hadn’t been a day in her mother’s life when Dot had not been beaten by him, from the age of five until she left the family home at nine to go into domestic service. Stone also said he had abused her and her sister when they were little girls.
You never know what to expect with Stone. Horrifying trauma in one sentence, shopping at Cos the next. She’s at home in Los Angeles when we talk and looks fabulous – blond bob, huge pink specs, pearls “the size of small quail eggs”, a white shirt baggy enough for David Byrne, white trousers ripped in all the right places. She moves away from the smartphone, so I can see. “I will show you my entire ensemble. The shirt’s down to my knees. Let me get where you can see all of me. Let me put you on my bookshelf and then you can see all of me.” Now, she’s using her smartphone as a mirror. “I’m putting a little lipstick on for you.” I tell her I like her glasses. “Oh thanks. I’m a glasses whore, I have to be honest.”
‘She was hilarious, but she said terrible things to me’ … with her mother in 2002. Photograph: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
Stone has often talked about being shy to the point of agoraphobia, but there is little sign of it today. As Dot said, she’s a talker: let the camera roll and you’ve got yourself a one-woman show. Imagine a scatological Norma Desmond as written by Alan Bennett.
Her voice is deep and mafioso raspy. She talks in italics, deals in extremes, tells outrageous story after outrageous story, segueing between the savage and the empathic, naming names to give libel lawyers a heart attack, before finishing her sentences with: “Right?” as if daring you to disagree.
For now, though, she’s not finished with Dot. Stone is 67 and for much of her life she thought her mother hated her. It was only later, when they became much closer, that she understood how troubled Dot’s life had been and the repercussions this had had for Stone and her siblings. Stone says Dot had a terrible death. “She was desperately afraid that when she died her mother and father would be there. She didn’t want to die, because she didn’t want to see them, because they were so awful. So I convinced her that I had put them in jail and they were not going to be there. She was in such hell.” She pauses. “Nobody comes through this life intact. So why do we pretend that one does?”
Her mother certainly didn’t. Nor, for that matter, has Stone. In her memoir, she describes being locked in a room with her grandfather and her sister. It’s a handsome piece of writing, merging the specific with the abstract so you’re never sure exactly what happened. At one point, she walks into a room when he appears to be sexually abusing her sister. Did he sexually abuse Stone, too? “Yes. And when I said so in my book, everybody went crazy about it and said I was telling other people’s stories. They were like: you’re telling your sister’s story, or this story, or that story. And I wasn’t telling anybody’s story. I didn’t name anybody’s name in my book. Not anybody unless they did any good.” It’s classic Stone, told with utter conviction – although she did name her sister.
Was her sister upset with her? “She’s refused to read my book, even though she encouraged me to write it, as did my mom, and I dedicated my book to Mom.” Did her grandfather sexually abuse her mother, too? “Yes, of course, and all of her sisters. That’s why she was removed from her home when she was nine. In her gym class, she was bleeding through the back of her uniform and her teacher brought in social services. They removed her shirt and she had been so badly beaten that her back was covered in scars and blood.
“I think the abuse is why all of her sisters went crazy. They were all treated for mental health problems. There were five of them and only my mom lived past 50. And they had a couple of other sisters who died in their early childhood.”
Nobody comes through this life intact. So why do we pretend that one does?
I ask how long her grandfather abused her for. “I got away from him by the time I was five or six, before he was super sexually abusive to me. I was a very savvy kid. I got away with much lighter abuse than other people did.”
Stone knows she has upset people by exposing family secrets, but she’s willing to pay the price. “When you’re the person to break the family chain, nobody likes you, right? Your family doesn’t like you, your friends don’t know what is happening with you. People just think you’re crazy and there’s something wrong with you.”
Although Stone’s relationship with her mother was troubled, she did observe a loving relationship between her mother and her father, Joe. Despite him being a harsh disciplinarian in her early years, Stone went on to have a wonderful relationship with Joe, a factory worker who became a tool and die manufacturer. He was a huge influence on her, telling her that if she wanted respect she had to demand it, and showing her how to assert herself in a man’s world. “My dad and I were tighter than two coats of paint.”
I tell Stone I could listen to her talking about her family for ever, but we should talk about movies – particularly Nobody 2. She doesn’t seem to hear, because she has moved on to the contemporary US. “In my country, in a democracy, there is a thing that we have to respect the office of the president whether or not you agree with what’s happening. When the president decides to remove democracy, does that remove our agreement to respect the office of the presidency?”
‘If you don’t like mothers and you don’t like women, you’re not going to get very far with creativity and expansiveness’ … with her eldest son, Roan, in 2021. Photograph: John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Images
That’s a good question, I say. What do you think? She says she doesn’t know, that she’s a Buddhist and in Buddhism they call it a koan – a paradoxical riddle that invites deep thought rather than a straightforward answer. She talks about the way the rights of protected minorities are being removed: “In our current administration, any disability is considered a fuck-off.”
Take dyslexia, she says. Her son Roan has it “and he is running three corporations”, including Cahuenga Media Group, a production and licensing company that focuses on music, television and film-related media. Her brother Patrick, who died in 2023, had it and was a “brilliant” master carpenter. She points out that many architects and scientists are dyslexic. “But what we’re looking at now in America, is: ‘OK, no more disabilities.’ Suddenly, nobody with disabilities has value. OK, we’re gonna fire everyone in these scientific jobs. And guess what? France is taking all of our scientists.”
Blimey! It’s not uncomplicated to keep up with Stone or get a word in (evidence suggests scientists are moving from the US to France because of the government’s funding cuts). She’s straight on to misogyny: “The sweetest fruit is at the end of the branch. These are the things that nature tells us, Mother Nature, Mother Gaia, Mother Earth. But if you don’t like mothers and you don’t like women, you’re not going to get very far with creativity and expansiveness.”
Does it feel like an anti-women time in the US? She removes her glasses and pins me with her glare. “It doesn’t matter, because we make you. And we care for you. And we raise you. And we feed you. And we house you. And we show you where your stuff is, because you couldn’t find your fucking socks without us. So if you don’t have our intrauterine tracking device to help you find your ass in a snowstorm, I don’t know what you would do. So you can be as anti-women as you want to be, and you can make babies in a test tube if that’s the world you want to live in – and have a good time!”
I assume she’s addressing Donald Trump, but it feels personal. I don’t want to live in that kind of world, I protest meekly. “Exactly! It’s never meant to be that way, because birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it, so the rest of this stuff is just nonsense. To me. OK? Because I am very much in league with Mother Nature, Mother Gaia.”
The newborn Stone was exceptionally vivid, as she’s quick to tell me. She describes herself as “fiercely intelligent” (two well-chosen words) and her IQ is reportedly 154 (genius level). She skipped several grades at school; at 15, she and four boys were sent to Edinboro State College in Pennsylvania as an “experiment”, three years ahead of most of their peers. She majored in English literature and excelled at golf, but left before graduating. “My college professor was furious when I was leaving for modelling,” she says. “He was like: ‘You’re throwing away your career,’ because he really thought my career was in writing.”
She moved to New York and became a successful model. In 1980, she made her movie debut as an extra in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, dazzlingly Monroe-esque, planting a kiss on a train window. She moved to Hollywood and took lessons from the acting coach Roy London, who also taught Brad Pitt, Robert Downey Jr, Forest Whitaker and Geena Davis. Over the next decade, she played numerous forgettable parts in forgettable films and television shows.
Breakthrough … with her co-star Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall. Photograph: Carolco Pictures/Allstar
In 1990, Paul Verhoeven cast her opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in the science fiction classic Total Recall. When she discovered Verhoeven’s next film was about an enigmatic writer and murder suspect called Catherine Tramell, she was determined to get the part. The problem was, Verhoeven, the screenwriter, Joe Eszterhas, and the male lead, Michael Douglas, didn’t want her, not least because she was largely unknown. Twelve actors (including the top choice, Michelle Pfeiffer, as well as Davis, Julia Roberts, Debra Winger and Kathleen Turner) are said to have turned down the part, which was regarded as risque and risky. Even when she started filming, Stone was convinced they were still looking for a replacement.
Basic Instinct was a huge success, becoming the ninth-highest-grossing film of 1992 and taking more than $350m worldwide. More significantly, it was the talking point of the year. LGBTQ+ campaigners picketed it because they believed the depiction of Tramell was homophobic – a occasional high-profile lesbian or bisexual character in a blockbuster and a sociopath at best. Critics scavenged over the film’s cultural carrion. Was it exploitative tack or, as the feminist academic Camille Paglia proclaimed, a compelling exploration of sexuality and power dynamics? Paglia said Stone gave “one of the great performances by a woman in screen history”, calling Tramell “a great vamp figure, like Mona Lisa herself, like a pagan goddess”.
And then there was that image. Or, at least, the idea of it. A split-second long – too miniature to fully register. Yet, somehow, almost seeing her vulva as she uncrossed her legs was more scandalous than simply seeing it. Stone said she had been duped into the shot, writing in her memoir that she was asked to remove her underwear to prevent delicate reflection and told nothing revealing would be shown. She had no idea it would be used as it was. Appalled, she considered legal action against the film-makers, but ultimately accepted the shot because it was true to Tramell’s character and artistic truth trumped personal humiliation. Basic Instinct made Sharon Stone and, to an extent, destroyed her. Astonishingly, that one image came to define her.
‘I didn’t know that this moment would change my life’ … recreating the infamous leg-cross scene from Basic Instinct at the GQ Germany awards in 2019.
She’s still proud of the film and regards it as a great performance – one only she could have given. The problem is, she says, casting directors deliberately conflated her with Tramell. “They said I was just like the character, like, somehow, they found someone who was just like that and she slipped into the clothes and it was magically recorded on film. Not that it was a difficult part to play and that 12 other actresses of great fame and fortune turned it down. Then, as it played everywhere on the globe for the next 20 years, people started to go: ‘Do you think this really has anything to do with the fact that we thought we saw up her skirt? I think maybe it’s actually a pretty good performance.’
“So it went from me being nominated for a Golden Globe and people laughing when they called my name in the room to people giving me standing ovations and making me the woman of the year. People came to recognise: she’s not going away, the film’s not going away, the impact of the film is not going away.” When she was named GQ Germany’s woman of the year in 2019, she recreated the scene, talked about the importance of empowerment and said, devastatingly: “There was a time when all I was was a joke.”
The film didn’t go away, but Stone did. After Basic Instinct, she made one great movie, turning in an outstanding performance as the damaged con artist Ginger McKenna in Martin Scorsese’s Casino. And then, I begin to say …
She finishes the sentence for me. “And then I got nothing. I never got any more parts.” Why? “I really wish you could tell me. Sometimes I think it was because I was too good.” Stone is not averse to bigging herself up. Nor is she averse to a conspiracy theory.
“Sometimes I think when you get nominated for an Academy Award and the greatest living actor on the planet doesn’t, that’s an imbalance in the male-female dynamic that is not great.” Does she mean Robert De Niro, her Casino co-star? She nods, before suggesting it wasn’t De Niro that was upset, but the powers that be.
Stone returns to the “too good” theory, telling me about a party she was at with Hollywood’s glitterati before the Oscars ceremony. “We were in this very small room. Sidney Poitier was there, Woody Allen, everyone. Francis Coppola came up to me and he put a hand on my shoulder, like my dad used to when something really serious was about to happen. And he said: ‘I need to tell you something and it’s really hard.’ He said: ‘You’re not going to win the Oscar.’ And I said: ‘What?’ And he said: ‘You’re not going to win the Oscar, Sharon.’ I went: ‘Why?’ And he went: ‘I didn’t win it for The Godfather and Marty didn’t win it for Raging Bull and you’re not going to win it for Casino.’
‘I am a big fat loser like Marty Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola’ … with Robert De Niro in Casino, for which she earned an Oscar nomination. Photograph: Archive Photos/Getty Images
“I looked at him and he went: ‘They can’t hear opera. And when you lose, Marty and I are going to be in the room, Sharon, and we want you to know you’re going to lose with us and we are there with you. But your performance will stand the test of time. Over the years, no one will remember who won and lost, but they will remember your performance.”
The way she tells the story, with such po-faced gravitas, is some performance in itself. She continues, in the voice of Coppola: “‘And what you have to do as an actress is remember you are not a regular actress, you are an opera singer. And not everyone will understand you, and not everyone will understand your ability. You will lose with Marty and you will lose with me, but you will always be in our losers’ circle.’” She finally allows herself a smile. “So that is what I have carried through my life – that I am a big fat loser like Marty and Francis Ford Coppola.”
It’s difficult to know why Stone didn’t get offered the roles she deserved after Casino, although, aside from the conspiracy theories, there were some other reasons. In 2000, she and her second husband, Phil Bronstein, adopted Roan and she focused on motherhood. A year later, at 43, she had a near fatal stroke. It’s a miracle she survived – she says her brain bled for nine days and doctors gave her a 1% chance of survival. She had to relearn to walk, speak and read.
Incredibly, she made a full recovery, but offers of work dried up. “In those days, as a woman, if something happened to you, you were done,” she says. “It was as though you did something bad or wrong. So even when I wanted to come back to work, it was like: ‘Sure, you can do four episodes of Law and Order,’ and that’s it. I did everything I was allowed to do to pay my penance for getting sick.” How long did that last? “That went on and on and on and on and I made nothing. And it just eventually became impossible to work.”
Why didn’t I get more parts? I really wish you could tell me. Sometimes I think it was because I was too good
When she was offered parts, she says, they were rubbish. “I reached the point where, after my stroke, and nobody wanting me, and people wanting me to do this silly, diminished work, I decided that I’m not going to work any more.” She corrects herself. She decided not to accept roles she didn’t like, which in effect meant not working.
She believes she has continued to be punished for Basic Instinct by the industry and in her private life. Stone says that when she and Bronstein got divorced in 2004, the film played a significant role in her losing custody of Roan. “They had my eight-year-old on the stand at one point, asking him if they knew his mother did sex movies.” She claims they reduced her to a tender pornography actor, then suggested that made her an unsuitable mother. She says the battle for Roan lasted 11 years, at which point she was finally given responsibility for Roan again. Nevertheless, at the end of her book, she thanks Bronstein and his wife “for finding a path to a whole, healthy and blending family with me. There is no greater gift.” As she says, she looks for the positive.
In 2005, she adopted her second son, Laird, now 20, as a single parent, followed by her third son, 19-year-old Quinn, a year later. With no quality film work coming in, she focused on the art forms she had loved as a child – writing and painting. Her gorgeous impressionist and abstract expressionist paintings now sell for tens of thousands of dollars. The titles (Quaaludes, Hoisted on My Own Petard, If We Make It) could be miniature stories.
I ask what the painting It’s My Garden, Asshole is about. “I was with a friend who was in her early 40s and had just had her second baby after losing her first. We were discussing how her in-laws had the audacity to tell her they thought she was a little too fat from the second pregnancy when a drone flew over my back yard. I thought: so many people have a lot of opinions about what we should do with our bodies and our faces while we’re delivering life on this planet, and taking care of everybody, and I was like: ‘You know what, it’s my garden, asshole!’”
‘I’m having a fun time’ … at Torino film festival in 2024. Photograph: Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images
Stone also became an activist, raising millions for people with HIV. In 2016, at 58, she went back to university to get the degree she had started at 15. “When Hillary [Clinton] was running for president and said: ‘You can do anything,’ I thought: that’s true, I should get my degree.”
Since Basic Instinct 2 in 2006 – much disparaged by critics and which she called “a piece of shit” – Stone has made few movies of note. But things are changing. This month, she’s back with Nobody 2, about a nobody, played by Bob Odenkirk, who turns out to be a top assassin. “Now, I’m making good films. I was good in Nobody 2 and I know it.” She certainly looks as if she’s having fun as the crime boss Lendina. Stone says when she was offered the part, she insisted on transforming her into a feminist hero. “I said: ‘I need this villain to be more personal to me.’ I don’t want to play villains unless they touch the zeitgeist. So I wanted this villain to feel as if she came out of social media, because that is the most scary thing right now.”
Why is she so often cast as a villain? “I think very beautiful, smart people are perceived in very specific ways. Because I’m a woman who is beautiful, it’s easier to have me not be emotionally intelligent, not have me be deep, not have me be tender and full. People don’t really believe that a beautiful woman is accessible to them.” And inaccessibility, she says, is regarded as a form of villainy. “Men don’t even ask you to date because they can’t imagine you are accessible to them. Within society, we have never said a woman can be beautiful and smart. And kind. And nice. And funny. And a mom. And the breadwinner. No, no, no, no. She couldn’t be all those things, because then, oh my God, she would be equal to a man! If I was beautiful and smart and nice, what would happen to society?”
Five more minutes, the publicist says. Stone is on a roll. “I could be UN person of the year, which I was [she was named the UN Correspondents Association global citizen of the year in 2023 for her humanitarian work]. I could pitch ideas to the United Nations and have them fulfilled and no one may ever know. I could be a Nobel Peace Summit award winner [in 2013 for her HIV and Aids work] and an Einstein winner [she won the Einstein Spirit of Achievement award in 2007, also for her HIV and Aids work]. I could win these awards, but we can’t also have me be nice, or kind, or compassionate, because what would happen? The. World. Would. Fall. Apart.”
Actually, I say, one of my favourite films of hers is one in which she is kind. In The Mighty, she plays the mother of Kieran Culkin’s Freak, a 12-year-old with a terminal condition. She says it’s one of her favourites, too. “And you know why I got that film? I’ll tell you exactly why I got that film. I got that film because I had a production deal with Harvey Weinstein and after years of him paying for my offices and my staff, paying for everything, he realised he wasn’t getting anything he was hoping for. And he turned around and said: ‘I’ve got this children’s book and I have to produce it.’” She stops, briefly. “But I was not going to fuck Harvey Weinstein.”
Did he try it on with her? “Well, I’m not the girl he’s going to take into a hotel room naked and I’m not the girl he’s going to grab. I am the girl he threw across the room at a cocktail party. And I am the girl that he hit. And I am the girl whose ass he grabbed, but I’m not the girl he’s going to rape or molest and I’m not the girl he’s going to ask for a massage, right? But I am the girl he’s going to give a production deal to and going to get fed up with and give a children’s movie to deal with.”
Stone has been associated with amfAR, an Aids research foundation, for 30 years, hosting many of its fundraising galas. In 2007, Weinstein got involved with the charity. “Harvey then put himself on the board, right? And backstage he would shove me around and yell at me and come on stage and grab the mic from me and try to make these inappropriate deals with his friends, like we’re gonna take that money from that guy on this item. Then I’d take the mic from him and say: ‘Harvey, get off the stage, I call the numbers, we’re not taking that deal.’
“I’d come off the stage and he’d shove me across the room and go: ‘Don’t humiliate me,’ and I’d go: ‘You’re a crook, Harvey, get your fucking hands off me.’ He did not try to fuck me, but he was definitely physically violent with me. He slapped me, he threw me across the room, he shoved me around countless times.”
Within society, we have never said a woman can be handsome and sharp. And kind. And nice. And humorous. And a mom. And the breadwinner
Last question please, the publicist says. Perhaps she’s as exhausted as I am. Stone is over the top, a little unreliable, thoroughly immodest and rather magnificent.
But it feels as if she has barely started. There is so much more to talk about. She has not even mentioned the time the producer Robert Evans advised her to have sex with her Sliver co-star, William Baldwin, to save the film and get a better performance out of him. (She was appalled and refused.) Or the time she had her breasts reconstructed after having benign tumours removed and the surgeon gave her a nonconsensual breast enlargement because he thought she would be grateful.
A couple of days before our interview, it was announced that Eszterhas, the Basic Instinct writer, was planning a reboot. Would she take part in it? She laughs. “There’s not going to be a Basic Instinct reboot. I hate to break it to you, but Joe Eszterhas couldn’t write himself out of a Walgreens drug store.”
It’s 20 minutes since the publicist told me to wrap up. I’m beginning to feel guilty, but Stone is still happily talking about empty nest syndrome, now that her youngest boys have left for college, and her plans for the future. She says she may lease out her home because she has so many projects on the go in so many places. She mentions her part in the novel series of Euphoria and “a beautiful film” called In Memoriam that she has already completed.
It sounds like you’re in a good place, I say. “I’m having a fun time. All of a sudden, the kids are out and I’m like: now what am I going to do? I think going back to work is what’s happening.” Despite everything – the abuse, the stroke, the fallout from Basic Instinct, the losses – she says she has always been a glass-half-full kind of gal. Actually, she says, even an empty glass can have its positives. “It can get refilled, right? Sometimes an empty glass is what you need.”
Nobody 2 is in cinemas in Australia from 14 August and the UK, the US and Ireland from 15 August
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