Celebrity3 min(s) read
Published 16:27 26 Jan 2026 GMT
Sharon Stone once claimed she slapped the director of Basic Instinct after seeing what he did with an explicit scene in the movie.
The scene in question - where Stone's character, Catherine, an author who becomes a suspect in the murder of a rockstar, is seen crossing her legs with no underwear on during a police interview - is the most-paused scene in cinema history, according to Far Out Magazine.
The steamy split-second moment is one of the most iconic scenes in cinema history from the 1992 erotic thriller, but Stone has been vocal about how she was allegedly "tricked" into baring all without her knowledge.
In her memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, Stone addressed the scene in Basic Instinct, which was directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by Joe Eszterhas, claiming in an excerpt shared by Vanity Fair that she was asked to watch the finished movie while accompanied not only by the director but also by lawyers and agents.
She was left shocked when she saw the explicit scene, claiming she was "tricked into taking her underwear off" after being told that nothing would be visible on-screen.
Stone revealed: "That was how I saw my vagina-shot for the first time, long after I’d been told, 'We can’t see anything - I just need you to remove your panties, as the white is reflecting the light, so we know you have panties on.'"
She explained: "Now, here is the issue. It didn’t matter anymore. It was me and my parts up there. I had decisions to make.
"I went to the projection booth, slapped [director] Paul [Verhoeven] across the face, left, went to my car, and called my lawyer, Marty Singer.
"Marty told me that they could not release this film as it was. That I could get an injunction."
However, Verhoeven disputed Stone's version of events, telling the Deadline: "She didn’t slap me at all."
He went on to claim that he and Stone were "on good terms", adding: "My memory is that [that scene] is all based on a woman that I met when I was a student in Leiden, at the university.
"She would do that: she would come up to us and she would open her legs. My friend and I saw her doing that, so went up to her and said something like, ‘We can see your vagina’. And then she said, ‘Of course - that’s why I’m doing it!’
"I told that story to Sharon when we were having dinner together during the shoot, and she thought it would be great idea to do that. So, that’s my memory."
He added: "She heard the story, and you know, in Joe Eszterhas’s script, there was already a mention [of that] in dialogue that he wrote between Michael Douglas and Sharon. They’re in the car, after the interrogation. It’s raining, and Sharon says to Michael, ‘You know I don’t like to wear any underwear, don’t you, Nick?’
"That line was in the script, and when you see the scene just before the interrogation, you see [she is getting dressed]. Michael is looking at that, and she puts her dress on, and she has no underwear.
"So that was already in the script, but, of course, the scene [where she would uncross her legs] was not in the script - that came into the movie when I discussed it with Sharon, when I told her the story. I know her story is a bit different, but that’s my story."
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