It may be hard to imagine anyone other than Sharon Stone in the provocative role of Catherine in “Basic Instinct,” but if it weren’t for a few words of advice from her acting coach, Stone may never have been cast in the 1992 thriller.
Before she auditioned for the role that put her on the map, Stone tells “Oprah’s Master Class” that she was an overeager student in an acting class taught by Roy London.
“I was working on these scenes and I was having a really hard time,” Stone recalls in the above video. “[Roy] called me up and he said, ‘That’s it. You’ve done all the scenes. You’ve graduated.'”
Stone was taken aback. “I was so upset. I was like, ‘But I haven’t, Roy. I haven’t. I didn’t get it. I know I haven’t gotten it,'” she says. “And then he said, ‘I want you to go home and I want you not to work on it.'”
Confused, Stone asked for clarification. “He said, ‘You overwork everything. Just don’t work on it,'” she says. “‘You’re just trying too hard.'”
Those five words sparked an epiphany for Stone. She went home and took London’s advice to not overwork the scenes. In her next acting class, Stone took the stage and let her instincts guide her performance.
“The scene ended and there was just silence in the classroom,” she says. “[Roy] turned around in the chair and looked at the class… He goes, ‘Well, what have we learned?’ And I went, ‘That I’m enough.'”
Two weeks later, Stone was cast in “Basic Instinct.”
Still, it wasn’t an easy part to get. “They offered it to 12 or 13 other women who turned it down,” Stone reveals. “So, it wasn’t like I got there and everyone was like, ‘Yay! She’s here!’… But I knew, walking on that set, that I was enough.”
“Oprah’s Master Class” airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on OWN.
