Sharon Stone says she initially didn't know her vagina would be on display in that famous scene from 1992's Basic Instinct. As she wrote in her 2021 memoir, she was told she needed to remove her panties due to lighting issues and only discovered a camera had been pointing up her skirt at a screening of the completed film. The scene, which Stone said she allowed to remain in the movie, would cause her to lose custody of her son, the actor now reveals. In a podcast interview, Stone says a judge cited the scene during a 2004 divorce hearing before awarding custody of Roan, whom she and Phil Bronstein adopted in 2000, to her ex, per the Guardian.
"Do you know your mother makes sex movies?" the judge asked Roan, then 4, Stone tells Bruce Bozzi on the Table for Two podcast, per Variety. It was "abuse by the system—that I was considered what kind of parent I was, because I made that movie," Stone says. "People are walking around with no clothes on at all on regular TV now and you saw maybe like a 16th of a second of possible nudity of me—and I lost custody of my child," continues Stone, who was granted visitation rights to Roan. "It literally broke my heart," the 64-year-old adds. She says the ordeal put her in the Mayo Clinic "with extra heartbeats in the upper and lower chambers" of her heart.
The Basic Instinct scene would color much of her career. Stone recalls peers laughing when her name was read out as a nominee for best actress in a drama at the 1993 Golden Globes. "I was so humiliated ... I just wanted to crawl into a hole," Stone says. "Does anyone have any idea how hard it was to play that part? How gut-wrenching? How frightening? To try and carry this complex movie that was breaking all boundaries and everyone was protesting against, and the pressure." She spoke in 2021 to the New Yorker about the pressure of working on "a feature film for a major studio" that "had nudity, sex, homosexuality, all these things that, in my era, were breaking norms." (More Sharon Stone stories.)
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