Indomitable Sharon Stone Laughs In The Face Of A Reporter’s Questions About Sexual Harassment

First things first: Sharon Stone is a fearsome valkyrie of a woman. Part brassy dame, part space cadet, part ferociously observant crouching tiger. For the entirely of her time spent as a famous actress, she’s been the epitome of “actress” in Hollywood, and all that that entails. She can be loopy and over the top, and that’s just in her red carpet appearances, but there has always been the spine of a survivor in there.

She got famous via Total Recall and Basic Instinct, two Paul Verhoeven movies where the line between power and exploitation was blurred. In the former, the audience was given to cheer raucously when her villainous character was shot by heroic Arnold Schwarzenegger (“consider that a divorce”); in the latter, she uncrossed her legs without underwear, held a room full of tough cops in the palm of her hand, and killed without consequence. From that point on, it was a struggle for Stone to gain respect in an industry where sex was rewarded and punished with equal enthusiasm. She’s rode career ups and downs, and when I saw her show up in a cameo in The Disaster Artist, I yelped with joy and realized that now, in 2018, Sharon Stone represents a kind of Hollywood survivor. A bombshell who stuck to her guns and saw her career heat ebb and flow over and over again, but whose star persona can still light up a room.

That was the Sharon Stone who laughed right into CBS Sunday Morning interviewer Lee Cowan’s face over the weekend when he asked her a fairly meek question about whether she had any experiences in her career that would fall under the #MeToo umbrella. Her response is utterly captivating:

“I’ve seen it all,” she says, with a mask of defiant amusement.

Sharon’s laughter didn’t feel malicious, but it also wasn’t some nervous titter. The idea that it was even a question that she experienced sexual harassment over the course of her 40-year acting career may have initially struck her as laughable, but that sustained, unblinking, nearly mirthless laughter wasn’t so much a reaction as it was a statement. It is to laugh, sir. Cowan didn’t do anything wrong by asking, and Stone wasn’t looking to punish, but she also made it very clear that the situation in Hollywood is laughably awful. That it should go without saying that a woman who started in the business 40 years ago, who was beautiful, and who had no one looking out for her would have experienced some form of harassment or another.

Sharon Stone is a warrior in a sweater cape. She’s a survivor with a flair for the deliciously dramatic. She’ll next be starring in HBO’s Mosaic, which premieres on January 22nd.