The actor who “crossed a line” with Sharon Stone on set: “Not today, pal”
Long before she became one of the biggest stars of the 1990s, Sharon Stone was a struggling acting student with a dream of performing opposite one particular legend of the business.
In these nascent days as an inexperienced actor learning the ropes, Stone even admitted to telling her acting coach exactly who her dream scene partner was. She was likely met with a scoff and a roll of the eyes, but she was never someone who was unafraid to dream big.
So, when she spoke with Business Insider in 2025 and revealed her dream was always “to work with De Niro and hold my own,” fans could have been forgiven for reacting with a knowing smile. After all, Stone did get to act with the iconic Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s Casino, and even walked away with a ‘Best Actress’ Academy Award to boot.
However, Stone’s experience going one-on-one with De Niro in some of Casino’s most demanding scenes turned out to be tough. Her dream didn’t quite turn into a nightmare, but she did admit that the “apex” star might have pushed her a little too far one day. They were shooting a restaurant scene with De Niro’s ‘Ace’ Rothstein and Stone’s Ginger McKenna in which Rothstein is questioning how truthful she is being with him, but when De Niro threw in a perfectly calibrated improv, it stuck in Stone’s craw.
“I always wanted to work with Bob,” Stone remembered. “I had auditioned with him many times before Casino. There’s a scene in the movie where we’re sitting across a table arguing, and he says to me, ‘You’re a good actress, you know that?’”
To the uninitiated, this adlib might have seemed perfectly innocuous and in keeping with the scene. Stone knew, however, that De Niro was fully aware of the imposter syndrome she was feeling while working on Casino, because every outlet in Hollywood had questioned whether the Basic Instinct star truly had the acting chops to cut it in a Scorsese picture opposite titans like De Niro and Joe Pesci. So, when he made that comment about Ginger’s acting ability, Stone knew he was actually playing on her real-life insecurities.
“I remember in that scene when he said it, how furious it made me, because it was my dream to do it, and then he challenged me at the table,” Stone recalled, her ire rising at the memory. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, buddy. Not today, pal.’”
Thankfully, Stone soon realised that De Niro wasn’t talking down to her, or trying to prove to everyone that she was a bad actress. Instead, he was trying to heighten her performance by touching a very real nerve that would generate raw, unbridled emotion. “He knew every button to go for with me because he is the greatest observational actor,” Stone marvelled. “He can crawl under your skin and get in there.”
In the end, Stone rose to De Niro’s challenge and produced what most cinephiles would pinpoint as her greatest performance. It was gratifying for Pesci, who Stone had known for years before the movie, and had “always backed” her as an actor. She admitted Pesci was more “fun” to work with, but she appreciated the role De Niro, a man she once dubbed “the greatest living actor on the planet”, played in drawing such a ferocious performance out of her.
