Sharon Stone was told not to play her career-saving role in ‘Casino’: “We don’t think you should go there”
Though she wasn’t in the limelight for that long in the grand scheme of things, Sharon Stone made quite an impact.
She might have burst onto the scene with Total Recall, but everyone remembers where they were when they first saw her in Basic Instinct. Her provocative performances brought her praise and infamy in equal measure and, for a while, her’s was the name on everybody’s lips.
Her one and only Oscar nomination came for playing Ginger McKenna in Martin Scorsese’s 1995 film Casino. A hustler of the highest order, Ginger uses his womanly wiles to seduce big-shot mobster Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein, played by Robert De Niro, and, as a result, becomes a part of his gambling operations. This was the first time Stone had been allowed to truly air out her acting muscles, having previously been confined by somewhat pulpy erotic thrillers. She put in a lot of work for the part, and it paid off, but it may have all stayed an early morning dream as she very nearly didn’t accept the gig.
According to a contemporary overview of film in 1995 published by the Los Angeles Times, Stone’s “advisors” warned her to steer well clear of the project. According to journalist Sean Mitchell, somebody close to the star said, “It’s like this woman is so unsympathetic, she ties her kid to the bed, gets loaded and does coke… Sharon, we don’t think you should go there”.
The way in which women were perceived in general was very different in the mid-1990s. In the view of the public, Stone seemed to exclusively play scheming, selfish women who took advantage of their physical beauty to dupe unsuspecting men. Ginger fit a lot of these tropes, so it’s entirely possible that her inner circle was attempting to spare her from being typecast.
According to the actor herself, though, this was the part she was born to play. “I think for a long time people just did not know what to do with me,” she said. “I looked like a Barbie doll, and then I had this voice like I spend my life in a bar, and then I said these things that were alarming and had ideas that didn’t make sense. And finally, I got with Marty and Bob, and they were like, ‘Give it all to us, baby, just let her rip; if you’ve got it, we want it, let’s see what you can do’.”
Stone was absolutely correct to follow her instincts. As well as the Oscar shoutout for ‘Best Actress’ (which she lost to Susan Sarandon for Dead Man Walking), the performance won her a Golden Globe for ‘Best Actress in a Motion Picture—Drama’. Unfortunately, this would prove to be something of a last gasp for her, whose career began to drop off for various reasons. Still, at least she can say she won a major award for starring in a Scorsese picture, a chance most actors would give their right arm and leg for.
Sometimes, an actor just knows when a part will be good for them. It might have looked like Stone was walking down a dead-end street, but she was able to use Casino and Ginger McKenna to swerve herself to a new path of Hollywood success. Other people’s educated opinions shouldn’t be completely dismissed, of course, but sometimes you have to follow your gut and run into the wall.
