Sharon Stone appeared on the Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade podcast this week, where she reflected on her 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live. The actress hosted the late-night sketch show to promote Basic Instinct and some of the skits were themed around the actress taking her clothes off.
On the podcast, Carvey acknowledged that Stone “was such a good sport,” adding that “the comedy we did in 1992 with Sharon Stone, we would be literally arrested now.”
One sketch in particular was the “Airport Security Sketch,” in which male airport security officers made the actress removed her clothing one item at time to check if she was carrying anything dangerous. Carvey played an Indian security guard, who eventually started filming her after she took off her shirt.
“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. Spade added that it was “so offensive.” Carvey continued, “It’s so 1992, you know. It’s from another era.”
“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,” Stone replied. “We didn’t have this sense. That was funny to me, I didn’t care. I was fine being the butt of the joke.”
She added, “Now we’re in such a weird and precious time. 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.”
Carvey also reflected on playing an Indian character, saying, “there was no malice in it.” “It was really me rhythmically trying to get laughs,” he explained. “So I just want to say that watching it — comedy needs a straight person and you were perfect in it. You were completely sincere and you made us funny.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Stone opened up about her SNL monologue, which she described as “super scary.” She reflected on how protesters rushed the stage in Studio 8H right before the show was going live, leading the arrests of six people who were apparently upset about her work as an AIDS activist.
“I came out to do the monologue live, which is always super scary, and a bunch of people started storming the stage saying they were going to kill me during the opening monologue,” Stone remembered. “The security that’s always in there froze because they’d never 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 said, adding, “I honestly blacked out for half of the show.”
