Sharon Stone covers the latest issue of InStyle, mostly to promote herself and let everyone know that she’d like to keep working. She looks great, honestly, and I wouldn’t mind seeing her in more movies and TV shows. Certainly, there should be a place for a 65-year-old Sharon Stone. Her InStyle profile leans heavily into the mythos of Sharon Stone, with vivid descriptions of just how famous she was in the 1990s following Basic Instinct. What sort of goes unsaid is how much fun she had during that time, how much she loved being famous. In retrospect for Stone, she makes it sound like a huge drag, but she really did love it back then. Some highlights from InStyle:
The LAPD came to her house & put her in lockdown during the OJ Simpson/white Bronco chase: “He’s dangerous,” Stone remembers an officer telling her. “And we don’t know how dangerous, and we don’t know what this is.” You—a non-famous person—would perhaps wonder what could compel officers to draw a connection between a manhunt and an unrelated celebrity. Stone didn’t question it. Her life had spun so wildly out of her own control. They said she needed to go. She went. At the hotel, one officer stood near reception and another kept watch at Stone’s door “while O.J. was driving up and down the f–king freeway,” Stone says. Returning to her old place was out of the question. “[The police] were like, ‘Find a secure house behind a gate.’” So she did. It was an unrenovated shell, and the lone home on the market she could afford.
It’s expensive to be famous: “It’s very expensive to be famous,” Stone tells me now. The house she closed on from the nondescript hotel, the staff she hired to keep her safe, the publicists, the makeup artists, the managers—it added up. “You go out to dinner, and there’s 15 people at the table, and who gets the check? You get the $3,000 dinner check every single time.”
She always kept her eye on the money: “I was living in a house that didn’t have floors,” Stone says. People wanted her to be grateful. She wanted to be smart. When critics ravaged her, “it was like, ‘Oh, welcome to fame. I’m pulling the pin on the grenade. Run, motherf–ker.’’”
What fame looks like now: “At least now [people] understand that Jennifer Lawrence can’t just skip onto an airplane. Nicole Kidman can’t jump onto Delta. Sharon Stone can’t do it either, whether or not she’s doing a lot of movies. [People] think, ‘What have you been in?’ And it’s like, Dude, they know me in the Amazon rainforest. It’s tampons, Q-tips, and Sharon Stone.”
She survived the tsunami of fame: “I think that I lived is more than many of my predecessors did, and that really pissed off a lot of people,” she says now. She means that insta-icons have not always fared so well (not just the likes of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, but Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland), and the public and the media have never been particularly sympathetic to their struggles. “We’re supposed to go crazy or we’re supposed to be drug addicts, but surprise, motherf–kers.”
Moving on after her divorce: “I made an altar, and I sat at that altar, and I worked with many people to teach me forgiveness. You can’t bite into the seed of bitterness. Once you bite it, you can’t spit it out anymore. I found limits. There’s a limit to me. For so long, everybody wanted me to be all things to all people because I was the limitless Sharon Stone. F–k that bullsh-t.”
The end of Roe v. Wade: “Not to have bodily autonomy is just primitive. It’s caveman time, and I just find it laughable. It’s a lot of chest pounding over things that don’t belong to people pounding their chests.”
She pitched a Barbie movie, years ago: The pitch did not go over well. This was “back in the white hot days, back when Jesus lived. They took us out of the studio like we were on fire.” She was thrilled to see Gerwig and Robbie—whom she lovingly calls her “movie daughter” — triumph where she had been thwarted. “It makes me want to cry, actually,” Stone says, “because I think of all the times I sat at my kitchen table, thinking, This is f–king torture. I was banging my head against this supposedly glass ceiling, but it felt like it was made of f–king concrete.”
While I haven’t been around as long as Stone, I remember the fights she and Julia Roberts had about getting paid seven figures per movie, then eight figures. Demi Moore was in that mix too, fighting to get paid what she felt she was worth. It was a huge deal in the ‘90s, that actresses were standing on business and fighting the studios for bigger paychecks. This was also a time before every actress had a lucrative side gig – like, Sharon wasn’t feathering her nest with brand ambassadorships and beauty contracts during the ‘90s either. Anyway, I always enjoy when women talk about money because I do wonder who gets paid what. For all of the freebies given to celebrities, it’s worth remembering that they really do have to pay for their teams (and security).
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, cover courtesy of InStyle.