by Sharon Stone has named the producer who allegedly pressured her to have sex with a co-star so they would have better “on-screen chemistry”.
The Basic Instinct actress, 66, claimed that Robert Evans encouraged her to sleep with Billy Baldwin while they were shooting the 1993 thriller Sliver to boost his performance in front of the camera.
Evans, who won an Oscar for Chinatown in 1975, apparently told her that sleeping with her on-screen lover would “save the movie” and “get things back on track”.
Stone said she was seen as the film’s “real problem” because she didn’t want to have sex with Baldwin and encouraged the studio to hire a better actress instead.
She claimed Evans, who was married seven times and died in 2019, called her into his office to pressure her.
Stone told the Louis Theroux Podcast: “He called me into his office. He had these really low 70s/80s couches, so basically I’m sitting on the floor when I should be set up.
“And he’s running around his office in sunglasses explaining to me that he slept with Ava Gardner and I should sleep with Billy Baldwin, because if I slept with Billy Baldwin, Billy Baldwin’s performance would improve, and we needed Billy do better in school. Movie because there was a problem.
“My real problem with the movie was me because I was so uptight, so not like a real actor who could f— it up and get things back on track,” she said. . “My real problem was a— so tight.”
Evans was widely praised as a videographer for his production work, including in the first two Godfather films.
But his career declined as his drug addiction took hold and in 1980 he was given a suspended prison sentence for cocaine trafficking.
Stone recalled the incident in her 2021 memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, but did not name Evans or Baldwin at the time.
She wrote: “He paced his office with balls falling out of his mouth and rolling across the wooden floor as he explained to me why I should f— my co-star so we could continue forward. screen chemistry.
“No one is that good in bed. I felt they could have just hired a co-star with talent, someone who could deliver a scene and remember his lines.”
Writing on X, formerly known as Twitter, Baldwin said: “I’m not sure why Sharon Stone keeps talking about me all these years later?
“Is she still mad at me or is she still hurt after all these years because I hindered her progress? She told her gal pal Janice Dickinson the day after I screen tested and ran into them on our MGM Grand flight back to New York.
“I’ll make him fall so hard on me, he’ll make his head spin. I’m so dirty it would make her head spin but I kept quiet.”
He added: “The story of my meeting with Bob Evans begging him to let me choreograph the final sex scene in the photo below so I wouldn’t have to kiss Sharon is absolute legend.
“I wonder if I should write a book and tell the many annoying, cinky and unprofessional stories about Sharon? That might be fun.”
Sliver was widely criticized upon its release, earning the Razzie and Stinker awards for worst film of the year.
‘No suspense, no drama, no logic’
One review stated that there was “no suspense, no drama, no tension, no logic” and called Baldwin’s performance a “fair understatement”.
Stone also told the podcast that she lost custody of her adopted son, Roan, because of her role in Basic Instinct, which was filmed a year before Sliver.
In one famous scene, her character is being questioned by the police when she slows down and crosses her legs, revealing that she is not wearing any underwear.
More than ten years later, a judge asked Roan during a custody battle if he knew “that your mother makes sex films?”.
He eventually decided that the eight-year-old should stay with Phil Bronstein, Stone’s ex-husband. The couple adopted Roan in 2000 after several miscarriages.
Stone said the loss of her son left her in “shock”, causing her to stop eating and eventually end up in hospital.
Referring to the scene, she said: “Because of that, people tried to reduce me as a person [for] playing this extremely powerful, manipulative, sociopathic character and playing it well.
“But because you saw a quarter of this frame up my skirt, they wanted to reduce me as a person, me personally, the woman who took the part. And I mean, I lost custody of my child over that.
“The judge said I made sex films. The judge asked my tiny child if he knew his mother made sex films. I was in shock.
“I ended up at the Mayo Clinic with extra heartbeats in the upper and lower chambers of my heart, because I didn’t stop eating.”
She added: “I didn’t even know what was happening to me. I was so confused that I could participate for three months and lose my baby.”
