Billy Baldwin revealed Sharon Stone was a former co-star he would never like to work with again, and the actor clapped back with her own biting words about their film Sliver.
In her interview with Variety, Stone was asked to try to guess some of the famous lines from her films. She read, “You’ve been spending too much time with your vibrator,” and couldn’t place which role it was from. She initially believed it was from her film Sphere before her memory kicked in.
“No, not ‘Sphere.’ The one, the name of the building. Oh! Sliver,’ she said. “I made a rule that no one was allowed to even say that word for years. And that’s why, because, what terrible dialogue. Clearly written by a man without enough to do.”
Sliver was written by Joe Eszterhas, who had worked with Stone on Basic Instinct. The erotic thriller, directed by Phillip Noyce and based on the Ira Levin novel, starred Stone as a book editor who moves into a new luxury Manhattan apartment. She soon starts a heated romance with video game designer Zeke Hawkins, played by Baldwin, as murder and mystery take place.
The film wasn’t Stones’s biggest success, but many see her comment about Sliver as a possible dig at Baldwin’s recent comments about her.
On Tuesday’s episode of the Lisa Guerrero Unleashed podcast, Baldwin revealed that the ‘Basic Instinct’ star was someone he will “never, ever work with” again. It was largely due to what happened on the set of their 1993 film. Baldwin alleged that there was horrible tension between him and Stone that made being on set together miserable.
“We got along pretty well the first couple weeks,” he recalled. “And then she wouldn’t say ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ to me for the next three months.”
Their tension on set was palpable and made filming their erotic scenes together difficult. He went as far as having a meeting with producers and saying, “I can do the scene but just please don’t make me kiss her. … I can’t kiss her.”
It led to their movie characters hooking up against a column in the film, and they did, in fact, not kiss in the scene. Baldwin admits that he’s never told the story before, and it might go “viral.”
The actor also called out Stone for “badmouth[ing]” his acting skills on Larry King Live when the film first premiered. Stone also claimed in her memoir that the film’s producer urged her to sleep with Baldwin to have him perform better on camera, but Baldwin claims he had a different story. He was told they were getting reports of bad tension, but the producer chalked it up to “pent-up sexual energy” and not bad acting.
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