Sharon Stone Once Threatened a Cameraman With a Gun on the Set of ‘Basic Instinct’
Actor Sharon Stone wanted to make sure the camera caught nothing but her good side while filming Basic Instinct. To make sure the cameraman did a decent job, she quipped that she threatened him if his work didn’t meet her standards.
Sharon Stone once revealed that she was body-shamed in her younger years
One of the benefits that Stone had gotten from getting older was that she loved her body more. In her younger years, she didn’t have the same level of confidence in her physique as she does now. This was even the case on the set of Basic Instinct, where she had to undo others’ attempts at changing her looks.
“I’m so grateful to my body. When I was younger, everybody was telling me what was wrong with my body — too this, too that. When I got on Basic Instinct, they hired a makeup artist that put on pounds of makeup every day, and every day I went to my trailer and took the makeup off. But I wasn’t allowed to choose my makeup artist, nor was my name [above the title] on the poster,” Stone told Allure.
What made her appreciate her body more was realizing the beauty that came from growing from a young girl into a woman.
“I started to understand that I was going to go for being more like a European woman who got more beautiful with age and who could understand that women are more beautiful than girls because they know something,” she said.
Sharon Stone once threatened a cameraman with a gun if he didn’t shoot her body correctly
In a 1995 interview with Esquire, Stone revealed that she was a gun owner who had good practice with the weapon. She’d learned from her father how to properly use a firearm, who helped honed her marksmanship.
“I grew up shooting beer bottles off of tree stumps,” she said.
The Quick and the Dead actor mostly kept guns at her house for protection.
“I have one under my bed,” she continued. “Because if someone comes into my house, I’m going to shoot him.”
Stone decided to use her gun to help make sure she was filmed in the best way possible on Basic Instinct. She did this by bringing a gun to the set of the movie to playfully threaten the cameraman with it.
“’If I see one ounce of cellulite on the screen, you’re a dead man,’” she remembered warning him.
Sharon Stone was briefly held hostage by a gunman
Stone has asserted that, at least when it comes to people, she’s fearless. The Catwoman star believed she’d be able to handle herself in a life-threatening situation involving anyone with a gun.
“I’m a person who doesn’t panic,” she said. “People don’t really scare me. If someone pointed a gun at me, it wouldn’t scare me as much as just being home alone, up too late, with a gun of my own. Do you know what I mean? I’m more scared of myself. Like someone once told me, I have a mind that’s kind of like a bad neighborhood—I shouldn’t go in there alone.”
Although she was speaking in hypotheticals, Stone knew what it felt like for a gun to be held against her head. Years ago, she was briefly taken hostage by a masked gunman inside a grocery store.
“’Anybody move and I’ll blow her f****** brains out,’” she remembered the gunman screaming at customers.
Spooked by a shopper suddenly entering the store, the gunman left. Stone briefly hid behind a Jiffy Pop display before contacting the authorities who told her to wait until they arrived.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah, right, let me stay here and wait for the accomplice to come in the back door,’” she thought at the time.
She would then put the cops on hold and slip through an alley to head home, unfazed by the event.
