Ellen DeGeneres Once Refused to Do a Love Scene With Sharon Stone in Their HBO Film
Comedian Ellen DeGeneres and Sharon Stone once teamed up for the 2000 HBO movie If These Walls Could Talk 2. Since they were portraying a couple, the film would require an intimate love scene between the two co-stars.
But whereas Stone may have been used to doing such scenes, an inexperienced DeGeneres was adamantly against it at first.
Ellen DeGeneres and Sharon Stone co-starred in the movie ‘If These Walls Could Talk 2’
If These Walls Could Talk 2 was a television movie that aired on HBO in the year 2000. The film followed three LGBT couples in three different time periods, featuring an ensemble cast that included Sharon Stone, Ellen DeGeneres and others. As the name suggests, it was a sequel to 1996’s If These Walls Could Talk which starred Demi Moore.
Stone was brought on to the project by one of the film’s directors and screenwriters, the late Anne Heche. In an interview with Larry King, Stone shared that all it took was a simple phone call from Heche to recruit her for the movie.
“Well, when Anne called me and said she had written something she wanted to direct, I thought, ‘I bet that’s good because she’s a smart, talented, funny, interesting, compelling, truthful person.’ So I said, “I really want to read that,” Stone said.
Stone also considered the former TV host as a huge draw to the project.
“And when I read it and it was a romantic comedy that was very well done, and I knew that I could co-star opposite someone who was really facile with comedy and that I would be able to learn from Ellen, I thought this is terrific. So I decided to do it,” she added.
Ellen DeGeneres was against doing love scenes with Sharon Stone
Doing love scenes was new territory for DeGeneres. Although Stone may have been accustomed to doing scenes of this nature, DeGeneres hadn’t been seen in a similar way before. It was a far cry away from the characters she’d portrayed on television, most notably in her hit sitcom Ellen.
”It’s a different side of me,” DeGeneres once told The New York Times. ”My TV character was always a self-deprecating, very nervous, very goofy kind of person, a grown-up but kind of like a child. I was like Peter Pan for a while. I’m a little more grown-up in this. There’s a sexuality about me that people haven’t seen.”
This created some hesitance on her part when it came time to film love scenes with the Basic Instinct star.
“I fought Anne for months, saying I wouldn’t do the love scene. She was like, ‘It’s Sharon Stone.’ I said: ‘I won’t do the scene. I’m not getting naked. I’m not going to kiss somebody else,'” DeGeneres insisted.
It was a concept that Heche, who DeGeneres was dating at the time, had trouble wrapping her head around.
”What other lesbian on the planet would say, ‘I won’t do a love scene with Sharon Stone’?” Heche quipped.
But DeGeneres reminded there was much to think about when opening herself up to the camera.
“To me, it’s a very private thing that I don’t think you show the world, and yet it was important to show that part of the relationship,” DeGeneres said.
Sharon Stone felt more compatible with Ellen DeGeneres during their love scene than with most male co-stars
Eventually, DeGeneres gave in and did the scene with Stone. Unlike DeGeneres, however, the Casino actor had no qualms with pretending to make love to her co-star. In fact, Stone asserted she had a more comfortable time with DeGeneres than she had with most male actors.
“I have to say that I’m not gay. But I was more compatible in my love scene with Ellen than I have been in some other love scenes….. that I’ve had to do with men,” she said.
She asserted this was because Stone and DeGeneres were familiar with each other. With some of her other male co-stars, Stone just didn’t share that same connection.
“Because some people you don’t have as much of a comfort. We have a comfort, a friendship that made it easier for us to be,” Stone explained.
