Sharon Stone’s major issue with Meryl Streep: “Part of what Hollywood does to women”
Being classed as one of the best in any given profession can present its own set of problems when the person in question becomes so synonymous with greatness in their field that they become the measuring stick everybody else is compared to. Meryl Streep didn’t ask for it, but it happened anyway.
It would be foolish – not to mention wrong – for anyone to try and state a compelling argument claiming Streep isn’t one of the greatest actors in cinema history. She’s got a record-setting 21 Academy Award nominations to prove it, with her three wins tying her for second on the all-time victories list for male and female performers behind only four-time winner Katharine Hepburn.
That’s without even mentioning her two Baftas from 15 nods, her three Primetime Emmys, and nine Golden Globes. Most performers in the post-Streep generations virtually worship the ground she walks on and hold her in the highest regard as the pinnacle of acting excellence. Again, these folks aren’t talking nonsense, but Sharon Stone had a serious bone to pick with the ongoing deification.
She’s got nothing against Streep on a personal level, though, with Stone’s issues instead driven by the industry’s relentless need to continually pit women against each other. The Basic Instinct, Casino, and Total Recall alum has a massively successful and awards-laden career of her own, but she drew the line at Streep being invoked as some kind of bucket list item that she was lucky to have chalked off when they worked together on Steven Soderbergh’s 2019 dramedy The Laundromat.
“I like the way you phrase that, that I finally got to work with Meryl Streep,” Stone bristled to Zoomer. “You didn’t say, ‘Meryl finally got to work with Sharon Stone’. Or we finally got to work together. The way you structured the question is very much the answer to the question. The business was set up that we should all envy and admire Meryl because Meryl got to be the only good one. And everyone should compete against Meryl.”
Stone did note that Streep “is an amazingly wonderful woman and actress,” but she’s still just an actor at the end of the day. “In my opinion, quite frankly, there are other actresses equally as talented as Meryl Streep. The whole Meryl Streep iconography is part of what Hollywood does to women.”
She would then name Viola Davis, Emma Thompson, Judy Davis, Olivia Colman, and Kate Winslet as just some of the names who are “every bit the actress Meryl Streep is” before once again reiterating her distaste for how she inadvertently became the byword for what every female actor should want to be. “For fuck sake,” she raged. “You say Meryl, and everybody falls on the floor.”
