The movie that sent Sharon Stone into Hollywood exile: “They banned me from the studio for eight years”
Sharon Stone has a very complicated history with Hollywood. At one point, she was the industry’s golden goose. Her performances in two of Paul Verhoeven’s most famous films, Total Recall and Basic Instinct, earned her fame, fortune, and notoriety in equal measure. Then came her turn in Martin Scorsese’s Casino, widely regarded as the best role of her career and one that should have made her a permanent fixture of the prestige cinema scene. Unfortunately, that’s not how it worked out.
The Academy Award nominee has been very frank about how she feels the movie business chewed her up and spat her out. She’s spoken about all sorts of mistreatment that she allegedly suffered and is almost as famous as a Hollywood pariah as she ever was in her prime. In her mind, at least, all of this misfortune can be traced back to a single film – the 1995 western The Quick and the Dead.
Directed by Sam Raimi and starring the likes of Stone (who also co-produced the venture), Russell Crowe, Gene Hackman, and young Leonardo DiCaprio, The Quick and the Dead ended up being a launchpad for many of those involved. It marked Raimi’s first major step away from the low-budget horror scene in which he had made his name and gave both Crowe and DiCaprio a platform before they really hit it big. Unfortunately, for every up, there must be a down, and Stone’s career plummeted after her involvement in the project.
“I had so much resistance on that movie,” she told Variety many years later. “I wanted Leo DiCaprio: ‘Pay him out of your own money.’ I wanted Russell Crowe: ‘Why do you want this guy who has only played a skinhead before?’ I wanted Sam Raimi to direct: ‘Sharon, why do you always shoot yourself in the foot?’ They banned me from the studio for eight years after that.”
Sony, the studio in question, was supposedly sceptical about DiCaprio’s involvement, as he was still an unproven commodity at the time. As a result, Stone genuinely paid his salary out of her own pocket. Two years later, Leo would set the world on fire with Titanic.
Stone then pondered if this response had anything to do with the fact that she was a woman, remarking on how far female voices in the film industry had come since the mid-1990s. “I am grateful that women get to work now, but I didn’t – not for 20 years,” she remarked. “When I turned 40, that was it. No more work for Sharon.” To this day, she still feels betrayed by Raimi, who apparently never spoke to her again after she gave him a career leg-up. The director’s next movie, A Simple Plan, was a major critical hit, and it wouldn’t have been possible with Stone’s previous financial support.
While she wasn’t completely out of work following her clash with Sony, Stone’s career never again reached those lofty heights. She had a hit on Netflix in 2020 with Ratched, a prequel series for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but even that was cancelled after one season.
Even though it had a detrimental effect on her career, Stone has reached a certain level of peace with The Quick and the Dead. “Karmically, it worked out great. Financially, not so much,” she said. “I feel that my biggest accomplishment is surviving. It’s a big deal surviving in a business like this.”
