In her new memoir, the actress describes her suffering during the most celebrated years of her career.
In the 80s/90s few stars had the cachet of Sharon Stone, who was part of the greatest hits of the time such as Total Recall, Basic Instinct or Casino. All while she cultivated a facet of a s-x symbol that we have been forced to reread with the outbreak of MeToo, and the late revelations that the actress has made about what happened in that decade. Her prolific career in Hollywood has not been exempt from very unpleasant aspects that the actress has been reeling off in recent years, and that form the backbone of her memoir book, soon to be published in the US: The Beauty of Living Twice, to which Vanity Fair has had access to and from which he has collected some shocking revelations.
As the Oscar-nominated actress recounts in this book, during her heyday in the mid-'90s, she was pressured to sleep with her co-stars to further her on-screen chemistry. The pressure came from several producers whose identity Stone has not revealed, and to whom she already raised a clause in her contract according to which she could give the go-ahead to the actors with whom she worked. "Nobody cared. They signed who they wanted. To my misfortune and to the detriment of the film, sometimes”, explains the actress.
This ended up leading to the aforementioned pressures. “A producer explained to me that I had to fuck my co-star so we could have chemistry on screen. Because apparently, on her day, she had made love to Ava Gardner and the result was sensational. Just the creepy thought of her being in the room with Ava Gardner made me think. Then I realized that she also had to put up with him and pretend he was interesting (...) 'You insisted on this actor when he couldn't pass the test... and now you think if I fuck him he'll become a good actor? Nobody is that good in bed,'” she remembers thinking.
“I thought they could have just cast a talented co-star, someone who could remember his lines. I also thought that they could throw it at them and leave me out. My job was to act and I said so, but it was not a welcome response. They considered me difficult." Due to these refusals, Stone would have been considered a controversial actress in the upper echelons of Hollywood, very interested in managing her after the immense triumph that Basic Instinct had brought in 1992. A film where Stone had already suffered intolerable treatment at the hands of her Director, Paul Verhoeven.
Stone has already told it on other occasions: the iconic sequence of this thriller, in which Catherine Trammell crosses her legs in front of some shocked policemen, was so shocking thanks to a deception suffered by the actress. Little did she know that the scene would feature a close-up of her private parts, something she has delved into in her memoir. "I first saw the shot of my vagina long after being assured 'we can't see anything, we just need you to take off your panties because white reflects light.'"
"I went to the projection booth, I slapped Paul (Verhoeven), I left and called my lawyer," he recalls, although he could not do anything to prevent the public from attending this scene, and transforming it into part of pop culture."Yes, there have been many points of view on the subject, but since I am the owner of the vagina in question, let me tell you that the other points of view are bullshit," Stone adds in her book. A lot of people ask me about my superstar days. They were like this. Play the game or get off the field, girl."
The Beauty of Living Twice is part of the effects that MeToo has had on the Hollywood industry, converging in a critical examination of this type of dynamic. The actress insists on the importance of this movement, and how necessary it has always been. “I believe in everything that is happening now. The law, not just the media, needs to get to work on this. In this time, this generation, the government has to listen to us. To all of us ”, she assures.
