It’s not just that her father hung the carcasses of the animals he shot on the clothesline during her childhood in rural Pennsylvania and her mother once pulled a huge nail out of Stone’s foot that had gone straight through, wrapped it up and then sent her back outside to play. Stone, now 68, was a self-described “weirdo” growing up, bringing a live bat to school for show-and-tell and chasing kids with snakes rather than “playing bride.” Extremely smart, she started second grade at age 5 and took college classes at 15 (she got into Howard, she says, but her father was afraid to send her — “I imagine I would for sure have just a bundle of beautiful little biracial children right now. The reason she moved to New York at 19 to be an Eileen Ford model was that her older brother had been busted for having several kilos of cocaine and sent to Attica, and the threats against her family from people who thought he might rat them out made it too risky for her to stay.
My older brother is seven years older, and if I didn’t want to die, I had to be physical to not get the shit beat out of me.” Back then, she rode horses naked, shot guns and arrows and swung happily from vines over a ravine. Stone had good luck in the city. At 20, she got an audition to be an extra in Woody Allen’s 1980 “Stardust Memories.” She roller-skated there with her big black modeling portfolio under her arm — “Clomp, clomp, clomp,” she says — and sat silently beside Allen at a bus stop while he took a few minutes to look it over.
A couple days later, when an actress with a bigger role dropped out, Allen chose Stone to take her place. But Stone also has had some seriously bad luck: In 2001, nine years after she played the part of the panty-less serial killer Catherine Tramell in Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 “Basic Instinct,” which had catapulted her to superstardom, she had a vertebral artery rupture, a nine-day brain bleed and a stroke that took her seven years to come back from. During that time, she lost custody of her adopted son, Roan, now 26. (She has since adopted two more boys on her own, Laird, 21, and Quinn, 20.) “And I lost my place in the business,” she says, “and had to start from the bottom all over again.” When asked how she got her career back, she says simply, “I didn’t.” But in fact, Stone has made more than 40 movies, including Martin Scorsese’s 1995 “Casino,” opposite Robert De Niro, for which she won a Golden Globe and was nominated for a best actress Oscar.
She’s also appeared on TV, including recently as a Sherry Lansing-style Hollywood executive opposite Sydney Sweeney in Season 3 of “Euphoria.” At the moment, Stone has three films in the can, including “In Memoriam” with Marc Maron, which premiered at the Tribeca Festival in June. I wouldn’t say so much that I was dark as I’ve always been full. I’m as fascinated by the dark as I am by the light; I’m not afraid of it.
I was always in trouble for my naivete, mostly about why everybody was scared — scared of me bringing the bat to school, scared of me picking up snakes in the garden. People were scared when I wasn’t scared. And what they would do is they would show the film to the press and then bring them in to interview me.
They were terrified, and they would sit down opposite me and panic. That hasn’t changed; people are still terrified of me in one way or another. I think that the basic construct of a woman declaring herself as separate and indomitable was, and remains, a terrifying construct.
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