Sharon Stone Says Michael Douglas Fight Threatened Basic Instinct Offer

Sharon Stone revealed in a recent interview with Business Insider that a blowout fight she had with Michael Douglas at the Cannes Film Festival allegedly made him refuse to screen test with her during the development of “Basic Instinct,” Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 erotic thriller.

“Michael Douglas did not want to put his bare ass out on the screen with an unknown,” Stone said. “And I understood that. He wouldn’t even test with me. But that was also for a different reason; we had an argument prior to that.”

“This was at Cannes. A bunch of us were all sitting, and he was talking about someone and their kids,” she continued. “I really, really knew this person he was talking about. So I said something and he responded to me, saying, ‘What the fuck do you know?’ It was in regard to a father-child relationship. Clearly, it triggered him. So he screams this at me across a whole group of people. And I’m not the person who goes, ‘Oh, excuse me, superstar.’ I pushed back my chair and said to him, ‘Let’s step outside.’ That’s how we first met.”

Stone said the two actors stepped outside and “I explained to him what the fuck I knew about this family he was speaking about, and that I was best friends with the children and the parent. And then we parted, I wouldn’t say as best friends, but amicably. So, fast forward to casting ‘Basic Instinct,’ I don’t think he wanted me to be his co-star.”

Variety reached out to Douglas’ representative for comment.

The tension created by their first encounter ended up proving beneficial to their casting in the erotic thriller, which stars Douglas as a detective investigating the murder of a rock star and Stone as a seductive writer who is the prime suspect.

“It worked great, because I was not rattled if he yelled at me,” Stone said. “That was interesting for the character, because Michael has a temper, and I didn’t care. That worked very well in our dynamic. Eventually, we became the greatest of friends, to this day. I admire him tremendously.”

“Basic Instinct” turned Stone into a movie star and an international sex symbol, in part due to the film’s infamous nude scene. In her 2021 memoir, “The Beauty of Living Twice,” Stone revealed she was misled into appearing nude in the movie. She had no idea about the nudity until she saw a screening of the film alongside agents and lawyers.

“That was how I saw my vagina-shot for the first time, long after I’d been told, ‘We can’t see anything — I just need you to remove your panties, as the white is reflecting the light, so we know you have panties on,’” Stone wrote in the memoir. “Now, here is the issue. It didn’t matter anymore. It was me and my parts up there. I had decisions to make.”

Stone added that she went to the projection booth and confronted “Basic Instinct” director Paul Verhoeven by slapping him across the face.

Variety reported last month that Amazon MGM Studios’ United Artists and Scott Stuber have acquired the rights to a reboot of “Basic Instinct,” with the original film’s writer Joe Eszterhas returning to pen the script. It’s unknown at this time whether or not Stone will return. She appeared in the 2006 sequel “Basic Instinct 2,” although it was panned by critics.

Head over to Business Insider’s website to read Stone’s interview in its entirety.