He writes regarding it Variety.
In an episode of The Louis Theroux Podcast, American actress Sharon Stone talked regarding the filming of the 1993 thriller directed by Phillip Noyce, “Sliver”. In the film, she played a publishing editor who moves into an exclusive apartment building in New York and discovers that its residents are hiding dark secrets.
Her partner on the set was Billy Baldwin. As Stone shared, the film’s producer Robert Evans allegedly wanted her and Baldwin to have more “on-screen chemistry” because it “would have saved the movie.”
“He’s running around his office wearing sunglasses and explaining to me that he slept with Ava Gardner and I should sleep with Billy Baldwin because if I slept with Billy Baldwin, Billy Baldwin’s performance would improve. And we needed Billy became better in the movie because that was the problem. If I might have slept with Billy, then we would have had chemistry on screen, and if I had just had sex with him, then that would have saved the movie,” Stone recalled of the conversation with Evans.
Previously, in her 2021 memoir The Beauty of Living Twice, the actress described the moment without naming Evans. In the book, she criticized Billy Baldwin’s performance, writing that they should have just hired a good actor instead of forcing her to sleep with Baldwin to make a good actor out of him.
“Do you think if I fuck him, he’ll be a good actor? Nobody’s that good in bed. I think they might have just hired a talented actor, someone who might stage a scene and memorize his lines. I also think they might have s***ed it themselves and not involved me. My job was to play and I said so. It wasn’t a popular response. I was seen as difficult,” Sharon wrote.
In the podcast, she added that the real problem with the film was herself, because she was so “not like a real actress who might just sh*t it and make things fall into place.”
At the time of filming “Sliver”, Stone became a successful actress following the release of the blockbuster “Basic Instinct”. She recalled: “I didn’t have to sleep with Michael Douglas. Michael might come to work and know how to get it right and do the lines and rehearse and act. Now all of a sudden I’m in a situation where I have to fuck people “.
Actor Billy Baldwin later posted in X his reaction to Stone’s words on the podcast.
“I don’t know why Sharon Stone keeps talking regarding me all these years later? Is she still in love with me or is she still suffering following all these years because I avoided her advances?… I have so much dirt on her that in she would have been dizzy, but I was silent,” Baldwin wrote.
Last year, Stone revealed on the Let’s Talk Off Camera podcast that she was sexually harassed by a former Sony executive who allegedly showed her his penis when she went to his office for a general meeting in the 1980s.
