Sharon Stone is opening up about her controversial Saturday Night Live appearance in April 1992. The Basic Instinct actress shut down SNL alum Dana Carvey’s apology for their “Airport Security Check” sketch while stopping by his and David Spade’s Fly On The Wall podcast in Wednesday’s episode, saying she had no problem “being the butt of the joke.”
As Stone looked back on her Saturday Night Live hosting debut, Carvey praised her as “such a good sport,” quipping, “The comedy we did with Sharon Stone, we’d literally be arrested now. That was 1992.” Carvey then referenced the sketch in which Stone played a woman who was stopped by airport security and asked to remove one item of clothing at a time.
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“I want to apologize publicly for the security check sketch where I played an Indian man and we’re convincing Sharon, her character, or whatever – to take her clothes off to go through the security thing,” Carvey said, as Spade chimed in that it was “so offensive.” Carvey added, “It’s so 1992, you know, it’s from another era.”
Stone, however, said she didn’t mind the sketch. “I know the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony. And I think that we were all committing misdemeanors [at the time] because we didn’t think there was something wrong then,” she explained. “We didn’t have this sense. That was funny to me, I didn’t care. I was fine being the butt of the joke.”
“Now we’re in such a weird and precious time,” she continued. “People have spent too much time alone. People don’t know how to be funny and intimate and any of these things with each other. Everyone is so afraid and are putting up such barriers around everything that people can’t be normal with each other anymore. It’s lost all sense of reason.”
Stone also had more pressing issues on her mind during the live taping. People stormed the stage to protest Stone’s work as an AIDS activist just seconds before her monologue, and the actress said SNL creator Lorne Michaels “personally saved [her] life” in the fray. “I came out to do the monologue live, which is super scary, and a bunch of people started storming the stage saying they were going to kill me during the opening monologue,” Stone recalled. “The security that was in there froze because they never had seen anything like that happen. Lorne started screaming at them, ‘What are you doing? Watching the f-king show?’ And Lorne started beating them up and pulling them back from the stage. The stage manager looked at me and said, ‘Hold for five.’ So all these people were getting beat up and handcuffed in front of me as we went live.”
Six men were ultimately arrested after the incident, and Stone quipped, “If you think the monologue is scary to begin with, try doing it as people are getting handcuffed in front of you.”
