Sharon Stone blasted cancel culture as ‘the stupidest thing’ she has ever seen and urged people to ‘grow some empathy.’
Stone, 63, made her comments while appearing on SiriusXM’s Just Jenny show to promote her new book The Beauty of Living Twice – which is scheduled for release on Tuesday.
Her new comments come after it was revealed in her new memoir that she claimed she was tricked into her infamous Basic Instinct scene and was pressured into sleeping with co-stars.
She also recently defended Christian Bale a dozen years after his profanity-laden outburst on the set of Terminator: Salvation went viral and said she had a ‘wonderful’ and ‘professional’ experience working with Woody Allen.
Stone, 63, made her comments while appearing on SiriusXM’s Just Jenny show to promote her new book The Beauty of Living Twice
Stone recently defended a viral outburst from Christian Bale, and said that she believes that a lot of people don’t fully understand what it takes for actors to do their jobs
‘I think cancel culture is the stupidest thing I have ever seen happen. I think when people say things that they feel and mean, and it’s offensive to you, it’s a brilliant opportunity for everyone to learn and grow and understand each other,’ Stone said.
‘We all come from different ages, different cultures, different backgrounds, different things, and have had different experiences, different traumas, different upbringings, different parents, different religious backgrounds, different everything.’
She added: ‘Give people an opportunity to discuss things before you wipe out their entire person over a statement or a comment or a misunderstanding. Stop being so small.’
‘The world is bigger. People have done so much more than one sentence. Like grow up. Grow some empathy,’ Stone said to SiriusXM’s Jenny Hutt.
Stone’s Basic Instinct scene has been hailed as the most heavily scrutinized in film history.
In the erotic thriller, Stone crosses and uncrosses her legs while not wearing any underwear as she toyed with a roomful of male police officers.
The scene was instrumental in making her a superstar and one of Hollywood’s most intimidating sex symbols.
It was also a shameful betrayal, according to Stone, who has described how she slapped her director Paul Verhoeven in fury and walked out of a preview of the lurid drama after discovering his assurances that it wouldn’t show up on screen had been a lie and that the audience could — as she put it — ‘see all the way to Nebraska’.
Her new comments come after it was revealed in her new memoir that she claimed she was tricked into her infamous Basic Instinct scene
Stone, 63, also claimed in her new memoir that she was pressured into sleeping with co-stars
Stone appeared on SiriusXM’s Just Jenny show to promote her new book The Beauty of Living Twice – which is scheduled for release on Tuesday
In a further broadside directed at the Dutch director, she describes making Basic Instinct, released in 1992, as ‘terrifying.’
The actress has, in the past, been ridiculed for her diva-like behavior and for posing naked for Playboy twice, the first time to get the Basic Instinct role and the second when she was 57.
Now, with the post-#MeToo era portraying notoriously hard-nosed Hollywood women such as her in a kinder light, she has come out all guns blazing against a misogynistic film industry.
In an excerpt which appeared in Vanity Fair, she disclosed that one of her directors insisted she sat on his lap during filming while film bosses pressured her to sleep with male co-stars to strengthen their on-screen chemistry.
According to Sharon Stone, her experience filming Basic Instinct ‘was terrifying’
She also revealed that while nakedly astride an actor with whom she had moments before been filmed making love, she hit him so ferociously with a fake ice pick that he passed out and she feared she’d killed him.
Stone also confided that, after years of dead-end acting roles, she was so desperate to get the Basic Instinct job that she had her manager use his credit card to unlock the door of the casting director’s office to obtain a copy of the script.
Stone had already made the sci-fi thriller Total Recall – in which she had a small part as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wife – with Verhoeven.
Verhoeven has vehemently dismissed her claims that she was taken by surprise in the leg-crossing scene, saying: ‘Any actress knows what she’s going to see if you ask her to take off her underwear and point there with the camera.’
He insists he’d already shown Stone the scene on a monitor, but she became embarrassed when the people around her warned it would ruin her career.
Stone said she had expected to watch the film alone with Verhoeven but they were joined by a roomful of agents and lawyers – few of whom had anything to do with it.
She said: ‘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”.’
“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 bull****,’ she added.
She claimed she called her lawyer who said she could get an injunction as it wasn’t legal under Hollywood union rules to ‘shoot up my dress in this fashion.’
Her lawyer also said the film would probably require an X-rating, which would have hamstrung its box-office chances.
Reminding herself how hard she had fought to get the role, and acknowledging that she’d have left in the scene if she was director, she eventually did nothing.
According to Stone, the film — in which she plays a calculating killer and Douglas is the investigating homicide detective who becomes obsessed with her — revealed ‘the dark side of myself’.
She said: ‘It was terrifying.’ She found herself sleepwalking three times during production, twice waking fully dressed in her car. She had ‘hideous nightmares.’
She described how they stopped filming an early stabbing sequence in the film and the actor she had been manically attacking ‘just lay there, unconscious’. Stone panicked, convinced the retractable ice pick she was using hadn’t actually retracted.
The actor was prostrate on a bed under which a special-effects man was lying, pumping fake blood through a prosthetic chest.
As the director kept screaming ‘hit him, harder, harder!’ and ‘more blood, more blood!’, Stone said she became faint with her exertions.
It appeared she had hit the actor so many times that he’d passed out. ‘I was horrified, naked, and stained with fake blood,’ she recalls. It seemed there was virtually nothing the director wouldn’t ask of her to make the film.
Stone said she admits she was opinionated and stood up to the men who ran Hollywood, only to be labelled as difficult.
Learning she was seen as an ‘intimidating’ presence to men in her industry makes her ‘want to cry’, she said.
‘I was often alone on a set with hundreds of men.’ And not just alone but sometimes naked, too.
She’s often asked what it was like for her at the height of her fame, she said.
‘It was like this. Play ball or get off the field, girl,’ she said.
The Hollywood star also recently defended Christian Bale a dozen years after his profanity-laden outburst on the set of Terminator: Salvation went viral.
She recently appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to promote her book and said she believes people don’t fully understand what it takes for actors to do their jobs as they convey emotion in chaotic environments.
Stone explained: ‘A lot people they don’t really get what that takes or that you have to have a small protected space to do that.
‘Many people are trying to get so much else from you while you’re doing that that you almost feel like you’re gonna snap and you’re criticized if you do snap.’
Colbert, 56, brought up her soon-to-be released book and asked if she wrote about any specific instances in which she snapped.
Stone instead brought up the 47-year-old British actor Bale instead saying: ‘I would not say so much for myself, but I can certainly say that I see that with such brilliant actors, like maybe Christian Bale, who completely transforms himself into someone else, whether he’s playing George Bush or whether he’s playing an anorexic or whether he’s playing an O.C.D. stockbroker, he becomes a different person.’
She went on to criticize those who have complained about actors like Bale who have had meltdowns on set.
Stone said: ‘People want to get up in his business while he’s trying to completely transform into another person. And then he’s like, “Get away from me!” And then they want to criticize him for not being available to them. I find that a little bit, you know, maybe they should just grow up.’
Back in 2009 there was damning audio of Bale from the Terminator Salvation set where he directed an expletive-laden tirade at Shane Hurlbut, the film’s director of cinematography.
Bale said Hurlbut had ruined his concentration by distracting him during an intense scene.
In Hollywood, it was widely agreed that Hurlbut had been out of order, but Bale made an apology on a Los Angeles radio station, saying that his language was ‘inexcusable’, and that he had ‘acted like a punk.’
Bale said at the time: ‘We’ve all done things we regret or we wish we could change. If you’ve done something you feel bad about, you have a choice – you can just move on and ignore it, or you can learn a lesson from it.
‘The incident was resolved within 30 seconds. But I take full responsibility for it. Absolutely.’
Stone also recently said she had a ‘wonderful’ and ‘professional’ experience working with Woody Allen, amid accusations of sexual abuse made against the filmmaker in the newly released HBO docuseries, Allen v Farrow.
Allen, 85, was first accused of sexually abusing his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow 29 years ago, but the allegations have gained renewed interest in light of the new docuseries exploring the claims.
While Stone acknowledged the series could have very well been ‘true’, she spoke highly of the director and recalled her positive experiences working with him starting at age 19.
Stone was promoting her new memoir The Beauty of Living Twice on Sirius XM’s The Michelle Collins show when the topic of Allen was raised, whom she wrote about in her book.
‘But I don’t want to say I never had an untoward experience with Woody Allen,’ the actress said on The Michelle Collins Show. ‘My experiences with Woody Allen were all wonderful, he was highly professional with me,’ she said.
‘He was extraordinarily encouraging to me and I was a young woman, 19, when I started working with him. I’ve done three films with him.’
She added: ‘He’s been nothing but spectacular with me. I have no experience of him being anything but terrific,’ she added. ‘I am fully aware of the documentary that’s come out recently, but I have zero of those experiences to report.’
‘I can say that while the [Allen v. Farrow] documentary may very well be a hundred percent true, it is not my experience. I had a super professional and a particularly wonderful experience working with him. Which is why I worked with him three times.’
