Sharon Stone stopped by Dana Carvey and David Spade’s “Fly On The Wall” podcast to discuss the time she hosted “Saturday Night Live” back in April 1992 shortly after the release of her erotic blockbuster “Basic Instinct.” Stone remembered being “terrified” during the live taping as protestors stormed the stage seconds before her monologue. Six men were eventually arrested due to the incident. Stone said “SNL” creator Lorne Michaels “personally saved my life” when the protestors charged.
“I came out to do the monologue live, which is super scary, and a bunch of people started storming the stage saying they were going to kill me during the opening monologue,” Stone recalled. “The security that was in there froze because they never had seen anything like that happen. Lorne started screaming at [security], ‘What are you doing? Watching the fucking show?’ And Lorne started beating them up and pulling them back from the stage. The stage manager looked at me and said, ‘Hold for five.’ So all these people were getting beat up and handcuffed in front of me as we went live.”
“If you think the monologue is scary to begin with, try doing it as people are getting handcuffed in front of you,” Stone added.
She said the protestors were mad at her “because it was the beginning of my work as an AIDS activist. No one understood at the time what was happening and they didn’t know if amfAR could be trusted or if we were against gay people. Instead of waiting for an intelligent, informative conversation they thought, ‘Oh let’s just kill her.’”
“I was so not prepared,” Stone continued. “As you remember, the audience wasn’t up like it is now. Every time we were making a change you’re really physically changing your clothes while you’re running through the audience. I was just terrified. I honestly blacked out for half of the show.”
When the conversation pivoted to some of the sketches, Carvey noted that Stone “was such a good sport” and “the comedy we did with Sharon Stone, we’d literally be arrested now. That was 1992.”
One of the more controversial segments was “Airport Security Sketch,” in which Stone played a woman who gets stopped by airport security and asked to remove one item of clothing at a time. Stone isn’t carrying anything dangerous, the security guards just want to see her take her clothes off. Carvey appeared as an Indian security guard.
“I want to apologize publicly for the security check sketch where I played an Indian man and we’re convincing Sharon, her character, or whatever—to take her clothes off to go through the security thing,” Carvey said, with Spade chiming in that it was “so offensive.”
“It’s so 1992, you know, it’s from another era,” Carvey continued.
Stone said she actually didn’t mind the sketch at all, adding: “I know the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony. And I think that we were all committing misdemeanors [back then] because we didn’t think there was something wrong then. We didn’t have this sense. That was funny to me, I didn’t care. I was fine being the butt of the joke.”
“Now we’re in such a weird and precious time,” Stone continued. “People have spent too much time alone. People don’t know how to be funny and intimate and any of these things with each other. Everyone is so afraid and are putting up such barriers around everything that people can’t be normal with each other anymore. It’s lost all sense of reason.”
Listen to Stone’s full appearance on the “Fly on the Fall” podcast here.