Sharon Stone’s biggest issue with being a sex symbol: “I have to straighten out my karma”
Despite what some people may think, being seen as a sex symbol is not always a blessing. Women throughout the history of Hollywood have struggled with the reductive label of being the blonde bombshell or love interest, with audiences caging them into one box that makes it incredibly difficult to be taken seriously or find roles with more depth. Whether it be Scarlett Johansson, Marilyn Monroe or Brooke Shields, many actors have discussed their experiences of being seen in a hyper-sexualised light and given roles that don’t reflect the full range of their talents, cast in roles in which their characters exist for very few reasons besides being eye candy.
Sharon Stone had to grapple with this in a very real way after her breakout role in Casino, struggling to find her footing in other films after becoming known for one thing. She is one of the most infamous femme fatales of the 1990s, slowly working her way up in Hollywood through small parts in Stardust Memories, Deadly Blessing and Above The Law before exploding to stardom after her roles in Total Recall and Basic Instinct. The actor found success through her collaborations with Paul Verhoeven, known for his exploitation films that usually contained explicitly violent or sexual subject matter that led him to become one of the most controversial filmmakers of his time.
The erotically charged nature of films like Show Girls and Basic Instinct could be make-or-break for the women who worked with him, with Elizabeth Berkley famously never recovering from her role in the stripper drama, while it miraculously had the opposite effect for Stone.
However, it was her role in Casino that sent Stone’s career to new heights, marking her as one of the most captivating heroines of her generation after her portrayal of the smooth-talking gangster’s trophy wife, earning her an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actress’. While this remains one of the high points in her career, Stone has since discussed the challenges of becoming typecasted for this type of role.
When explaining her thoughts on this, Stone said, “I have to straighten out my karma. I’ve become a sex symbol, which is an absurd thing for me. Particularly since I symbolise a kind of sex I don’t believe in.” This became an obstacle when trying to promote or create later projects, with people making assumptions about the genre/tone of the film before seeing him purely because she was starring in the project.
After making Basic Instinct and Sliver, audiences were quick to label the films as being psychosexual dramas, with Stone saying, “But it’s a different kind of movie. I wouldn’t insult the audience by going back and making the same kind. Yet they [Paramount] want to ride the coattails of that. They’re scared, I guess.”
Many audiences would head to theatres with preconceived ideas about the types of pictures that Stone would make, tainting their perception of a story and quickly labelling it as an erotic thriller despite the fact that there was more to the story lying underneath the surface. People like to categorise and label the actors we watch on screen, but perhaps if we weren’t so quick to judge, then we would gain more from the films we watch.
