The role Sharon Stone was blackmailed into playing: “Geena Davis is ready to go”
In the 1980s and ‘90s, erotic thrillers were having their heyday. Emerging from the dark, sexually charged tradition of the film noir, erotic thriller gave modern audiences a more direct version of torrid romances doomed from the start. In retrospect, very few of these movies made it out of the ‘90s with their reputations intact. Many of them were fear-mongering about powerful women, suggesting that anyone who was both professionally successful and female must be psychotic. However, at a time when complex, plot-driving roles for women were scarce, the genre was a welcome source of employment.
No one embodied the erotic thriller during this period more than Sharon Stone, whose performance as an ice-cold femme fatale in Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct made her a star. Released in 1992, just as the genre was reaching its peak, the film turned Stone into the go-to actor for steamy thrillers, even when other actors were more established.
A year after the film was released, producer Robert Evans became obsessed with casting Stone in his upcoming movie, Sliver. Based on a novel by Rosemary’s Baby author Ira Levin, the story follows Carly (Stone), a recent divorcee and book editor who moves into a ritzy new high-rise building in New York and discovers that several tenants have been gruesomely murdered. She entertains two love interests in the building (William Baldwin and Tom Berenger) while a mysterious voyeur records everything happening behind closed doors.
Stone had no interest in the film. After giving the definitive erotic thriller performance in Basic Instinct, she was wary of being typecast. As the shoot drew closer, Evans decided to resort to underhand tactics, leaning on his unchecked misogyny for inspiration. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly at the time, he said that “knowing a woman’s head about competitiveness with other women,” he decided to lie to Stone about all the other actors who were queuing up to take the role if she turned it down.
He first told her that Demi Moore was so desperate to take the part that her husband, Bruce Willis, had agreed to star in the film for free. When this didn’t work, he said, “Geena Davis is ready to go into makeup on Monday”. Davis had been one of the top choices for Basic Instinct before Stone won the part. “If this picture works,” Evans promised Stone, ”You have a bounty tag, a price tag that’s higher than anybody in the industry.”
Whether this was the reason Stone took the role is unclear, but she probably ended up regretting it, regardless of the price tag. The shoot was plagued with setbacks, most of which had to do with the threat of an NC-17 rating for all the sexual content. Instead of standing by their convictions and letting a film about sex be sexy, the producers and director Phillip Noyce opted for cutting it to pieces and changing the ending, which led to a disjointed result.
Although Sliver fared well at the box office and did particularly good business in the home video market, it was panned by critics and remains one of the weaker entries in the genre during the period.
