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The Golden Globe Award-winning actress also remembers slapping the movie’s director Paul Verhoeven after watching her infamous leg-crossing scene for the first time.
Mar 19, 2021
AceShowbiz –
“Basic Instinct” may be one of Sharon Stone’s most popular films to date, but filming for the movie has also left her with some bad experiences as a woman working in the industry. In her upcoming memoir “The Beauty of Living Twice”, the actress is looking back at the time she shot the 1992 erotic thriller.
In an excerpt from the book obtained by Vanity Fair, the 63-year-old recalls being told by one of the producers to sleep with a co-star to build a chemistry. “I had a producer bring me to his office, where he had malted milk balls in a little milk-carton-type container under his arm with the spout open,” she shares. “He walked back and forth in his office with the balls falling out of the spout and rolling all over the wood floor as he explained to me why I should f**k my costar so that we could have onscreen chemistry.”
But Sharon stood up for her own self, turning down the producer’s suggestion. “Why, in his day, he made love to Ava Gardner onscreen and it was so sensational! Now just the creepy thought of him in the same room with Ava Gardner gave me pause,” she writes. She recalls thinking, “You guys insisted on this actor when he couldn’t get one whole scene out in the test…. Now you think if I f**k him, he will become a fine actor? Nobody’s that good in bed.”
She continues, “I felt they could have just hired a co-star with talent, someone who could deliver a scene and remember his lines. I also felt they could f**k him themselves and leave me out of it. It was my job to act and I said so.” As a result, Sharon says she was labeled “difficult.”
Sharon doesn’t reveal the name of the producer who made such suggestion and which co-star that the producer suggested she should sleep with.
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While she managed to protect herself at the time, Sharon reveals being manipulated into stripping down for that infamous leg-crossing scene. She says she agreed to take off her panties believing that her private part would not be visible on camera. But she was shocked and left angered after seeing the scene for the first time.
“After we shot ‘Basic Instinct’, I got called in to see it. Not on my own with the director, as one would anticipate, given the situation that has given us all pause, so to speak, but with a room full of agents and lawyers, most of whom had nothing to do with the project,” she writes. “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.’ ”
The Catherine Tramell depicter says that she “slapped” director Paul Verhoeven “across the face” following the screening and called her lawyer, Marty Singer, who said she could get an injunction. “First, at that time, this would give the film an X rating. Remember, this was 1992, not now, when we see erect penises on Netflix. And, Marty said, per the Screen Actors Guild, my union, it wasn’t legal to shoot up my dress in this fashion. Whew, I thought,” she explains her rage.
“After the screening, I let Paul know of the options Marty had laid out for me. Of course, he vehemently denied that I had any choices at all. I was just an actress, just a woman; what choices could I have?” she further claims. “But I did have choices. So I thought and thought and I chose to allow this scene in the film. Why? Because it was correct for the film and for the character; and because, after all, I did it.”
Noting that sexual exploitation has been a common practice in the industry for a long time, Sharon remarks, “Sex, not just sexuality onscreen, has long been expected in my business.”
Sharon’s memoir will be available March 30 via publisher Knopf.
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