Sharon Stone has reflected on the impact her role in Basic Instinct had on her life as a mother. This week, the 64-year-old actress appeared on the latest episode of the podcast Table for Two with Bruce Bozzi, a program presented by iHeartMedia and AirMail, in which she talked about the fallout of her 1992 feature film, which included losing custody of her son.
“I lost custody of my child,” she shared. “When the judge asked my child – my tiny little boy, ‘Do you know your mother makes sex movies?’ This kind of abuse by the system that it was considered what kind of parent I was because I made that movie.”
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“People are walking around with no clothes on at all on regular TV now, and you saw maybe like a sixteenth of a second of possible nudity of me – and I lost custody of my child.” According to Stone, who has three sons, Quinn, 16, Laird, 17, and Roan, 22, losing custody physically “broke her heart.”
“I ended up in the Mayo Clinic with extra heartbeats in the upper and lower chambers of my heart,” she revealed. “It broke my heart.” This isn’t the first time the actress has spoken out about the difficulties of working on Basic Instinct. Stone spoke to The New Yorker for an interview last year, where she recalled how making the film “was taking a toll on everybody.” In a previous interview with The New Yorker last year, Stone spoke about how making Basic Instinct took a toll on everyone involved with the film. She expressed how they had to work through many challenges during the production.
“[Paul] Verhoeven [director] ended up in the hospital — his sinus thing ruptured, and he couldn’t stop having a nosebleed,” Stone said. “There was tremendous pressure on that set.” She added, “Now people walk around showing their penises on Netflix, but, in the olden days, what we were doing was very new. This was a feature film for a major studio, and we had nudity, sex, homosexuality, all these things that, in my era, were breaking norms.”
In her memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, Stone alleged that she was tricked by director Verhoeven on the set of Basic Instinct in order to film that infamous nude scene where her character Catherine Tramell uncrosses her legs and reveals that she wasn’t wearing underwear. According to Stone’s memoir, she was told she would not be able to see her private parts and was shown the final cut in a room full of “agents and lawyers, most of whom had nothing to do with the project,” and slapped Verhoeven when she discovered her nudity.
“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,’” read an excerpt obtained by Vanity Fair.
“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 bulls—. It was me and my parts up there,” Stone explained. After the viewing ended, Stone slapped “Paul across the face, left, went to my car, and called my lawyer, Marty Singer.”
According to Singer, the film could not be shown as it was due to rules imposed by the Screen Actors Guild. “It wasn’t legal to shoot up my dress in this fashion,” she explained. “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? 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.”
During an interview with Variety, Verhoeven said Stone knew what was happening during filming and that his recollection differed greatly from Sharon’s. “Her version is impossible,” Verhoeven said, adding that they still have a “pleasant relationship.”
“She knew exactly what we were doing. I told her it was based on a story of a woman that I knew when I was a student who did the crossing of her legs without panties regularly at parties. When my friend told her we could see her vagina, she said, ‘Of course, that’s why I do it.’ Then Sharon and I decided to do a similar sequence.”
