‘I went to punch him in the face’: Why producers don’t mess with Sharon Stone

In this week’s episode of Good Weekend Talks, we discuss the mercurial, talented actor Sharon Stone, perhaps Hollywood’s most famous femme fatale. Good Weekend writer Jane Cadzow was given a rare interview with Stone, who claims director Paul Verhoeven tricked her into removing her white knickers in that notorious up-the-skirt scene from Basic Instinct, by complaining they reflected the light.

“I can be quite imperious,” Stone admits to Cadzow, who discusses the actor’s tell-all memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, with Good Weekend editor Katrina Strickland. There was the time during the shooting of a film that Stone was supposed to be handed a gun with a quarter load of wadded paper in it. Someone had instead switched it to a full load, making it ricochet off the plexiglass she was shooting at and singe her eyebrow. Her response? “I grabbed the producer by the lapels, picked him up and went to punch him in the face. I said, ‘You motherf…er, you could have killed me. You’re a f…ing idiot! You broke the law, you f…ing idiot.’ ”

The discussion describes how Stone’s tough, demanding personality was forged by her challenging childhood, including the sexual abuse of her younger sister, Kelly, by their maternal grandfather.

At just 43, Stone was felled by a brain bleed that nearly killed her. “She was so charming – I found Stone extremely engaging,” Cadzow tells Strickland of the interview.

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