Why ‘Total Recall’ made Sharon Stone swear off Hollywood: “I’m not gonna work until I get a job I care about”
Before 1992’s Basic Instinct, Sharon Stone was a model-turned-actress known for fairly forgettable roles in action movies and horror flicks. Everything changed almost overnight when she played the ice pick-wielding femme fatale Catherine Tramell in Paul Verhoeven’s ultra-sexy, ultra-violent erotic thriller, though. Suddenly, Stone was one of Hollywood’s biggest sex symbols, and it took her a few years to break out of that mould and hit arguably her career peak with 1995’s Martin Scorsese crime epic Casino. Interestingly, though, there was a period before Basic Instinct where the frustrated young star felt like swearing off Hollywood thanks to a less-than-fulfilling experience on a future sci-fi classic.
In the late 1970s, Stone was living and working as a fashion model in Paris when she suddenly decided to get out of the modelling game to give acting a shot. As she put it, she basically packed up all her stuff, flew back to New York, and quickly auditioned to be an extra in the Woody Allen movie Stardust Memories. Allen took a shine to her, and she was cast as a woman who plants a kiss on a passing train. This launched her acting career, and by 1985, she was playing the female lead in the Indiana Jones-esque King Solomon’s Mines. She starred in the sequel Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold the following year before landing parts in action movies like the Steven Seagal vehicle Above the Law and Carl Weathers’ Action Jackson.
Unfortunately for the young actor, none of these roles were exactly her cup of tea – and the movies were largely woeful, too. In 1992, she told Playboy that the Allan Quatermain movies amounted to “A bad hairdo running through the jungle,” while she deadpanned, “I will refrain from comment” about Above the Law. So, it’s perhaps not surprising that when she was sent the script for a sci-fi action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, she wasn’t exactly delighted. The disillusioned star told her team, “I’ve done every stupid action movie I’m going to do. No, thank you,” – but then she was told who was directing the movie.
After finding out the Dutch maverick Verhoeven – who helmed Flesh and Blood and RoboCop – was making the movie, her opinion flipped on its head. Stone revealed she said, “Oh, OK. I don’t need to go to the meeting. If they want me, I’ll do it.” You see, she loved Verhoeven’s blend of artistry, violence, and sex, and after meeting him, she loved him as a person, too.
Despite claiming to Playboy that she had a great time making Verhoeven’s film – Total Recall, of course – when Stone was asked about it by The Guardian four years later, she’d changed her tune. She admitted to feeling a bit like Sisyphus in this period, forever pushing that godforsaken boulder up the hill before watching it fall back down on top of her. At one point, she confessed to telling her agent, “I don’t know if it’s all worth it,” to which they replied, “It’s not. You shouldn’t go on.” This was likely a canny bit of reverse psychology, though, because she got off the phone and thought, “She’s such a baby! I’ll show her.”
After Total Recall, though, her moxie disappeared again, replaced by the all-too-familiar Sisyphean despair. “I went, ‘That’s it,'” Stone revealed. “I’m not gonna work until I get a job I care about. If I have to do theatre in my garage and wait tables, that’s it for me.”
Amazingly, though, her saviour came in the form of Verhoeven, the same director who’d cast her in the movie that had her wanting to leave Hollywood in her rearview mirror. She pursued the role in Basic Instinct for months, and when it became an enormous hit and solidified her status as an A-list star, she realised something that made her smile. She had finally made it to the top of the hill and could now watch that boulder “roll back down”.
“When Basic Instinct came out on a Friday, I had one life,” Stone admitted, “and by Tuesday, I had another life.”
