Basic Instinct made Sharon Stone a household name — but she says it wreaked havoc on her own household, too.
The actor said on Tuesday’s episode of Table for Two with Bruce Bozzi that the 1992 Paul Verhoeven film, a rather risqué adult thriller for its time, became so notorious that she lost custody of her son more than 10 years after its release .
“I lost custody of my child,” revealed Sharon. “The judge asked my kid, my tiny little, tiny boy, ‘Do you know that your mother makes sex films?’ That kind of abuse by the system — that kind of abuse that I was considered my kind of parent for doing this film.”
“People are walking around completely naked on regular TV now,” she added. “You saw maybe a 16th of a second of possible nudity from me, and I lost custody of my child … I ended up at the Mayo Clinic with extra heartbeats in my upper and lower chambers.”
The Oscar-nominated star 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 the actor to seek full custody — only to be turned down in 2004, she now says, over the Verhoeven film.
“It broke my heart,” she said. “It literally broke.”
It was reported at the time that the judge merely denied her request to bring her son back to Los Angeles with her from San Francisco, where Roan was living with her ex-husband. The judge reportedly found that she tended to “overreact” to Roan’s various health issues and that Bronstein was better able to provide consistent care.
Open image modalStone’s son recently changed his name from Roan Bronstein to Roan Joseph Bronstein Stone.
Samir Hussein/WireImageGetty Images
“It ended my dating world too,” Sharon noted on this week’s podcast when Bozzi asked if her role in Basic Instinct alienated suitors. “And I also think that men didn’t want to date a woman that other men thought that way about. And that is also a failure of male reality. I can’t get through this.”
Sharon previously reflected on the custody loss in her 2021 memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, per 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 then what we were doing was very new,” she told The New Yorker in 2021. “This was a feature film for a big studio, and we had nudity, sex, homosexuality, all those things that went against norms in my day.”
On Tuesday’s podcast, Sharon also spoke about what happens when actors are unfairly associated with the people they portray.
“The guy who played Jeffrey Dahmer, nobody takes him for one [person] eats people,” she said, referring to Evan Peters in a recent Netflix series. “It doesn’t make him a serial killer who eats people or an antisocial person. That makes him a very complex person who has played an incredibly difficult role.”
For his part, Sharon’s son reportedly changed his name in 2019 — from Roan Bronstein to Roan Joseph Bronstein Stone.
Listen to the full interview on iHeart. (Stone’s comments about losing custody begin at about 25:27.)
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