“Basic Instinct” made Sharon Stone a household name, but she says it also devastated her own family.
The actor said on Tuesday’s episode of “Table for Two with Bruce Bozzi” that Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 film, a rather risqué erotic thriller for its time, became so popular that Stone ended up losing custody to his son for 10 years after release. .
“I lost custody of my son,” Stone told Bozzi, a former restaurateur. “The judge asked my son, my child, ‘Do you know your mother makes sex films?’ That kind of abuse from the system, that kind of abuse, that I was considered what kind of parent I am because I made that movie.”
“Now people are walking around without clothes on TV,” he added. “You saw maybe 16 seconds of my nakedness and I lost custody of my baby… I arrived at the Mayo Clinic with extra heartbeats in the upper and lower chambers of the heart.”
Stone married investigative journalist Phil Bronstein in 1998 and adopted their son Roan in 2000, according to Page Six. However, Bronstein filed for divorce in 2003, prompting Stone to file for full custody — only to be denied in 2004, he now says, because of Verhoeven’s film.
“It broke my heart,” Stone told Bozzi. “It literally broke.”
At the time, it was reported that the judge simply denied Stone’s request to move her son from San Francisco, where Roan lived with Bronstein, to Los Angeles with her. The judge found that Stone tended to “overreact” to Roan’s various health problems and that Bronstein was better able to provide consistent care.
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“It also ended the dating world for me,” Stone noted on this week’s podcast when Bozzi asked if her role on “Basic Instinct” scared away suitors. “And I also think that men didn’t want to date a woman that other men thought that way. And this is a failure of male reality. I can’t go all the way.”
Stone previously reflected on losing custody in her 2021 memoir, “The Beauty of Living Twice,” on “Entertainment Tonight.” She wrote that she was “punished for changing the rules of how we see women” and that she “slept every afternoon” and “couldn’t function” for years.
“Now people are walking around showing their penises on Netflix, but back in the day what we were doing was very new,” Stone told The New Yorker in 2021. . , sex, homosexuality, all these things that, in my time, violated the norms”.
On Tuesday’s podcast, Stone and Bozzi talked about what happens when actors are unfairly mistaken for the people they play.
“The guy who played Jeffrey Dahmer, no one thinks he is [person] eat people,” Stone said, referring to Evan Peters in a recent Netflix series. “It doesn’t turn him into a man-eating serial killer or an anti-social person. It makes him a very complex person who had an incredibly difficult role.”
Stone’s son, in turn, changed his name in 2019 from Roan Bronstein to Roan Joseph Bronstein Stone.
Listen to the full interview on iHeart. (Remarks on Stone’s loss of custody begin at approximately 10:27 p.m.)
