The US film “Sliver” (German: “The greed in your eyes”) from 1993 takes place in a New York apartment building with a dark history. Sharon Stone played the female lead. Stone was at the center of worldwide attention at the time thanks to her work in the erotic blockbuster “Basic Instinct”.
In her memoir “The Beauty of Living Twice,” published in 2021, Stone claimed that a prominent Hollywood mogul asked her to go to bed with a colleague. In her memoirs, the Hollywood star concealed the identities of those involved.
Now Stone has revealed on the British-English publicist Louis Theroux’s podcast that it was the notorious riot mogul Robert Evans who demanded that she undergo a kind of erotic therapy with William Baldwin, who was 29 years old at the time of filming.
The measure was supposedly intended to cure Baldwin’s poor acting performance. Evans, who died in 2019, was the long-time boss of Paramount Studios. His illustrious life is paved with sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.
In a casual chat with Podacst master Therous, Stone chatted:
“Evans was bustling around his office in sunglasses and telling me that he had slept with Ava Gardner at the time. Now I should do the same with Billy Baldwin because then his performance would be better.”
And further:
“If I slept with Billy, we would have good chemistry on screen and that would save the film,” Evans said. I was supposedly the real problem because I was such an uptight ass! A real actress would have just fucked him and made things right.”
The actress also reports that the studio bosses were actually responsible for her poor casting decisions.
A counterexample would have been “Basic Instinct”:
“I didn’t have to get into the box with Michael Douglas, for example. Michael came to work knowing how to create a certain atmosphere and then get to the point..”
In the podcast talk, Sharon Stone also said that she was labeled as “difficult” and was not offered a prominent role for a long time after Martin Scorsese’s 1995 gangster film “Casino”, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.
At the time she just thought:
“So now I’m in the ‘I have to fuck people’ industry!”
“You have to act like everything is super-duper when it’s NOT fantastic,” says Stone. “And then I just didn’t get any good roles for the rest of my life.”