Tonight on Netflix: This classic thriller ruins its lead actor’s life over one scene

Basic Instinct started the wave of erotic thrillers of the 90s, such as Body, Fatale, Last Sacrifice, Sliver or Red Moon. Currently available on Netflix, it is known for its interrogation scene, during which the suspect Catherine Trammell, played by Sharon Stone, half-opens her legs and succinctly reveals part of her body.

In the scene before the interrogation, Catherine Trammell gets out of bed naked and wearing a business suit and no underwear. So she should narratively not wear underwear. But if the actor’s features are seen briefly on screen, it’s for another reason, as Sharon Stone recounts in the 2020 documentary Basic Instinct – Sex, Death and Stone:

When we shot the scene, I was wearing white panties. Said it reflected the light so you could see I was wearing something. So he needed to remove it, because it would be covered with shadow, it would be covered and nothing would be seen. I did the test, looked at the monitor and did not see anything. (…) I took my thong, put it in my shirt pocket and said: I trust you.

Sharon Stone shot the scene without a cover and discovered the final result when the film was shown to the audience once it was finished. And then came the shock. “I realized there was a half-shot where you could start with a bob.”Stone recalls. “We didn’t see anything else, but there was this idea that we could see, and that idea is very powerful because we’ve never seen anything like it in a studio film.”

So Stone asks to cut the shot, but the director and editors refuse, arguing that the shot makes him a star. They did not make a mistake, but at what cost. The actor suffered several attacks just for doing this film and lost custody of his son on the grounds that he was making “erotic films”.

“I can’t believe they deliberately lied to me.”he concludes in the documentary. “I think they said to themselves during the filming that we won’t see anything. But the fact that they didn’t tell me anything broke my heart. Because I got everything he asked for and he didn’t respect me. And if it was Michael and we could see his penis, he would have warned me. .. or Michael would put his hand in his face!