Sharon Stone is opening up about the unexpected toll one of her most iconic roles took on her personal life.
More than three decades after “Basic Instinct” became a cultural phenomenon, the actress revealed that portraying Catherine Tramell affected her so deeply that she began sleepwalking during filming. Stone reflected on the experience in a recent interview, describing the role as both transformative and deeply unsettling.
Sharon Stone’s Experience
The now 68-year-old actress reflected on her experience during a chat with Keke Palmer for Variety’s Actors on Actors series.
“This is what ‘Basic Instinct’ did for me because I had to dig into every dark corner until I was — I literally was sleepwalking when I was making this movie,” she said. “I woke up three times in my car fully dressed [because] it was so traumatizing to play such a heavy character, such a dark person.”
She continued, “I was like, you know, cuz I’m a goofy person. It was so difficult. And then the reaction to it was so crazy. But I had to realize I went to all those places in me, and that’s all there is. I’m really so light. I’m like this [expletive] light boxes in here. I’m like a glowworm.”
Stone went on to say that what she learned from the making of the film was “how light” she was.
“It set me free,” she added.
Sharon Stone Had Nightmares
In the 1992 neo-noir thriller, Stone plays a crime novelist whose boyfriend is stabbed during a sexual encounter. Stone’s character quickly becomes the prime suspect as the crime is mirrored in her latest novel.
The actress previously revealed that she suffered from nightmares during her time on set, telling Vanity Fair that an actor whose character was stabbed by a retractable ice pick did not respond when the director yelled cut.
“I began to panic; I thought that the retractable fake ice pick had failed to retract and that I had in fact killed him,” she told the outlet in 2021. “The fury of the sequence, coupled with the director screaming, ‘Hit him, harder, harder!’ and, ‘More blood, more blood!’ as the guy under the bed pumped more fake blood through the prosthetic chest, had already made me weak. I got up, woozy, sure I would pass out.”
She added, “It seemed I had hit the actor so many times in the chest that he had passed out. I was horrified, naked, and stained with fake blood. And now this. It seemed like there was no line I wouldn’t be asked to skate up to the very edge of to make this film.”
While “Basic Instinct” was Stone’s breakout role, she has since gone on to appear in iconic films such as “Alpha Dog,” “Catwoman,” “Casino.”
She was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama for her role as Catherine Tramell. She later won the award in 1996 for her role in Martin Scorsese’s “Casino,” for which she was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.
