Sharon Stone became a star in 1992 due to her role in the blockbuster erotic thriller “Basic Instinct.” But in a recent interview, the actress said the role took a toll on her private life, leading to her losing custody of her son.
Stone, 64, revealed what happened during an appearance on this week’s episode of the podcast “Table for Two With Bruce Bozzi.”
“I lost custody of my child,” Stone said. “When the judge asked my child, my tiny little boy, ‘Do you know your mother makes sex movies?’ This kind of abuse by the system, that it was considered what kind of parent I was because I made that movie.”
At the time it was released, “Basic Instinct” generated controversy over its frank depictions of sex and sexuality, and criticism for depictions of sexual violence and for how it portrayed same sex relationships. The film is probably best-remembered today for a scene in which Stone’s character flashes a room full of cops by crossing and uncrossing her legs — which of course has been parodied dozens of times, including on “The Simpsons.”
It was also a huge hit, becoming the 4th highest-grossing film of 1992 with more than $350 million at the box office.
In the interview, Stone noted that at the time the role was very controversial, but nowadays is almost tame by comparison to how sex is depicted in film and television.
“People are walking around with no clothes on at all on regular TV now, and you saw maybe like a sixteenth of a second of possible nudity of me, and I lost custody of my child,” Stone said.
The mother of three said the experiencing of losing her son quite literally broke her heart. “I ended up in the Mayo Clinic with extra heartbeats in the upper and lower chambers of my heart. It broke my heart,” she said.
This isn’t the first time Stone spoke about the fallout after being a part of this movie. She spoke to “The New Yorker” in 2021 and explained how others were impacted including the director, Paul Verhoeven, who was hospitalized for a ruptured sinus, according to Stone.
Stone said, “Verhoeven ended up in the hospital. His sinus thing ruptured, and he couldn’t stop having a nosebleed. There was tremendous pressure on that set.”
“Now people walk around showing their penises on Netflix, but, in the olden days, what we were doing was very new. This was a feature film for a major studio, and we had nudity, sex, homosexuality, all these things that, in my era, were breaking norms,” Stone said.