Sharon Stone says the psychological weight of playing Catherine Tramell, the seductive suspected killer at the center of her 1992 breakout film “Basic Instinct,” left her exposed to people she describes as genuinely dangerous.
Speaking on the “Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown” podcast this week, Stone said she had, at times, gotten too close to the dark characters she has played on screen. Asked for an example, she pointed directly to “Basic Instinct.”
“When I did ‘Basic Instinct,’ and I had to really look at darkness, and yet I was very still young and inexperienced,” Stone said. “I didn’t understand about holding the core, the core self, the golden self, and then wrapping the character around it with the power of the self driving it. But just bringing it all in there and looking at it all, I opened some dark doors, right?”
She said the experience frightened her because of what it revealed, and because of who it attracted.
“Some of those dark doors really scared the living s— out of me, because I saw some real, real darkness. And what happened then is that real dark people identified and came into my life thinking, ‘Oh, you really are like me. You’re like me.'”
Stone said that misplaced identification had consequences beyond her personal life, telling the hosts that some people believed rumors about her simply because of the role. “People believed some of the dark things that were said about me because they thought, ‘Oh, you couldn’t do that if you weren’t like that because you’ve mirrored me to me,'” she said.
The experience, she said, taught her to be far more careful about who she let close to her.
“Really the one thing you got to remember is just because the devil’s a very interesting person at the cocktail party doesn’t mean you should invite that person, give them a seat. Don’t give that person a seat.”
Stone said protecting her “core self” became essential. “Don’t ever give up the core,” she said. “You can’t be porous. You just can’t be porous because if any of it gets in, all of a sudden the dark people, they want to be around you. They want to come to you. They think, ‘Oh, you’re like me.’ And when they find out that you’re not like them, they get upset. They get very upset.”
She went further, saying the toll nearly cost her life. “When the darkness came, I nearly died,” Stone said. “But the light saved me. The light is what saved me. And the universal consciousness of light that vibrated at my frequency is what saved me. Fortunately, enough of me held to the light and that just the crack where it got in was dangerous.”
A vision after her 2001 stroke
Stone also described, for what she said was the first time publicly, a spiritual experience she had while recovering from a near-fatal stroke. In September 2001, at age 43, Stone suffered a massive stroke caused by a ruptured artery and brain bleed, spending nine days hospitalized and undergoing emergency surgery.
She told Bialik and co-host Jonathan Cohen that during her early recovery at home, unable to sleep at night, she experienced a vision involving five glowing orbs.
“When I was laying on the couch, sleeping and awake, these orbs sort of presented themselves to me. These five orbs presented themselves to me and they sort of talked to me, but in a digital language.”
Stone said she believed the encounter foreshadowed losing custody of her son, Roan, who was then one year old. She recalled telling the orbs, “I don’t know if I’m supposed to stay here or if I’m supposed to die,” and that they responded, “You’re supposed to stay.”
She said she then asked two of the orbs to stay with her son. “I said, ‘I can only stay if two of you will stay with my son. Because I don’t want him to be alone, and I think he’s gonna get taken from me.’ Sure enough, he was taken from me. And I said, ‘We have to have an agreement. The two of you will stay with him and protect him.’ And they agreed. And they said, ‘But your destiny requires that we stay with you.'”
Stone and her then-husband Phil Bronstein adopted Roan in 2000. Bronstein filed for divorce a year later, and the couple finalized their split in 2004 with shared custody, though Bronstein became Roan’s primary caretaker. Stone went on to adopt two more sons, Laird and Quinn, now both 20, as a single mother.
Stone has said in the past that a confidentiality agreement limits what she can say about the custody case, but she has previously claimed her “Basic Instinct” image was used against her in court, saying a judge once asked Roan whether he knew his mother made “sex movies.”
Asked how long the vision with the orbs lasted, Stone said several days. She said she was not frightened by it. “I was curious,” she said, “but very much at peace.”
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