Sharon Stone’s bitter public feud with Billy Baldwin is nothing new and goes back to long before she claimed this week that she was pressured to have sex with him in order to improve their on-screen chemistry and his less-than-stellar acting in the 1993 erotic thriller “Sliver.”
Indeed, the feud goes back to that infamous film, Stone’s follow-up to her blockbuster 1992 hit “Basic Instinct.” Stone didn’t want the younger Baldwin brother to play her mysterious seducer in the sexually charged “Sliver,” about a New York book editor drawn into a world of voyeurism and murder. In fact, she reportedly wished she could have worked instead with his more famous and accomplished older brother, Alec Baldwin.
“He’s a boy,” Stone complained about Billy Baldwin to Joe Eszterhas, as the “Sliver” screenwriter explained in his book “American Rhapsody,” the New York Post reported.
HOLLYWOOD, CA – FEBRUARY 29: Actors Billy and Alec Baldwin attend the 76th Annual Academy Awards at the Kodak Theater on February 29, 2004 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Carlo Allegri/Getty Images)
“Give me a man. Give me Alec. I’d let Alec throw me over a table anytime,” Stone told Eszterhas, who also had written the screenplay for “Basic Instinct.”
At the time, Alec Baldwin was moving into leading-man roles after receiving critical praise for a string of roles in such hit films as “Working Girl,” “Married to the Mob” and “Glengarry Glen Ross.”
Meanwhile, Stone would “wipe her mouth after kissing (Billy Baldwin),” or she would “rinse it with mouthwash,” Eszterhas said, according to the Post. And, she once “bit his tongue during a kiss,” the screenwriter said.
Movie fans were reminded this week of Stone’s feud with Billy Baldwin and her appreciation for his older brother when she made bombshell claims on British-American journalist Louis Theroux’s podcast.
In her 2021 memoir, “The Beauty of Living Twice,” Stone, 66, wrote about an unnamed producer on a movie she was working on, who called her into his office and explained why she should have sex with an unnamed co-star so that they’d have on-screen chemistry.
On Theroux’s podcast, Stone revealed that the producer was the legendary Robert Evans, the movie was “Sliver” and the co-star was Billy Baldwin, 61. Actor-turned-producer Evans, famous for producing “Love Story,” the first two “The Godfather” films and “Chinatown, was “running around his office in sunglasses,” Stone said on the podcast.
He was “explaining to me that he slept with Ava Gardner and I should sleep with Billy Baldwin, because if I slept with Billy Baldwin, Billy Baldwin’s performance would get better,” Stone said.
Stone told Theroux that she was under a lot of pressure for “Sliver” to be a hit. At the time, she was Hollywood’s most in-demand female star after her iconic role as the alluring mystery writer Catherine Tramell in “Basic Instinct.”
But Stone doesn’t tell Theroux whether she followed Evans’ directive to have sex with Baldwin. For his part, Baldwin strongly suggested Tuesday that they didn’t have sex. In a post on X, Baldwin also hit back at Stone for bringing up their difficult relationship.
“Not sure why Sharon Stone keep [sic] talking about me all these years later,” the actor wrote. “Does she still have a crush on me or is she still hurt after all these years because I shunned her advances?”
Baldwin also said, “I have so much dirt on her it would make her head spin but I’ve kept quiet.” He also said it became “legend” in Hollywood that he didn’t want to kiss her when they shot their final sex scene together.
“Wonder if I should write a book and tell the many, many disturbing, kinky and unprofessional tales about Sharon?” Billy Baldwin wrote. “That might be fun.”
Entertainment Weekly reported on “Sliver’s” fraught production in 1993, saying that the two leads “quickly cooled to each other” after filming began. Baldwin reportedly quipped to a crew member after finishing a love scene with Stone: “Thin lips, OK breath.” Rumor has it that the film went over-budget and another cast member, Tom Berenger, blasted director Phillip Noyce for “sneaking around and manipulating” the cast, EW also reported. Even more troubling, a test screening in March 1993 left audiences unmoved by the sex scenes.
“They expected me to bring home another giant smash hit,” Stone told Theroux. “Sliver” ultimately made only about $126 million at the global box office and was critically panned. “Basic Instinct,” on the other hand, made more than $352 million globally and became a cultural phenomenon.
Stone said she was initially given approval over casting for “Sliver,” including over which actor would play her love interest.
Her reported preference for Alec Baldwin would have been based on the fact that the future Emmy winner and Donald Trump impersonator was hot property in Hollywood and seen as a leading man of the future. Of course, Alec Baldwin’s once high-flying career has hit a number of roadblocks and recently became imperiled after he was accused of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of a cinematographer on the 2021 set of his Western film “Rust.”
Meanwhile, Billy Baldwin has never risen above appearing in supporting roles in TV and film. But in the early 1990s, “Sliver” briefly presented him with a chance to rival his big brother Alec as the family’s hottest star, EW reported.
Stone told Theroux that she didn’t get final approval for casting, after all. In another book, Eszterhas quoted the director, Phillip Noyce, as saying that Stone fumed over Billy Baldwin being cast in the film, the New York Post reported.
“Billy Baldwin knew that Sharon Stone hadn’t wanted him in ‘Sliver,’ and their relationship was always tense,” Noyce said, according to Eszterhas. “I ended up having to shoot many of their close-ups with only one of them in the room at a time, because they didn’t want to look at each other.”