Sharon Stone Explains Why She Feared for Her Life Filming Saturday Night Live in 1992

Summary

Sharon Stone feared for her life on
SNL
due to threats linked to her work for AIDS charities.
Lorne Michaels intervened and saved Stone from attackers on stage during her hosting debut.
Stone faced obstacles and threats for her AIDS activism, impacting her career but leading to progress.

Sharon Stone says she feared for her life while appearing on Saturday Night Live as guest host back in 1992. As the actress was setting the big screen alight with her role in the erotic thriller Basic Instinct, her foray into the world of the small screen almost led to her being attacked as she prepared to do her live opening monologue on the long-running comedy show.

Saturday Night Live has occasionally seen comedy actors “die” on stage when their jokes don’t land the way they intended. For Sharon Stone, though, it was not her comedy prowess that caused her problems on the show, but her affiliation with AIDS charities that almost led to a nasty situation. Appearing on the Fly on the Wall podcast with Dana Carvey and David Spade, Stone explained how SNL creator Lorne Michaels “saved her life” on the night she made her hosting debut on the show.

“[Lorne Michaels] personally saved my life. I came to do Saturday night live with you guys and I was so excited to do and scared. 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. The police that are always in there and security froze because they had never seen anything like that happen, and Lorn started screaming, what are you guys doing watching the f*cking show. And Lorn started beating himself, beating up and pulling these people back from the stage. And the stage manager looked at me and went wait for five and I thought he meant for five minutes, but he meant five seconds. So all these people were getting beat up and handcuffed right in front of me and we went live.”

Why Sharon Stone Was Almost Attacked on SNL

NBC

When asked why people were so angry with her, Stone explained that at the time she was working with AIDS charities, and there were a lot of people at the time who did not understand or want to understand about the disease. This led to the star receiving a number of threats to her life. She said:

“They were made because it was the beginning of my work as an AIDS field worker, and an AIDS activist and they didn’t understand, nobody understood at that time, what was really happening, and they didn’t know if AmfAR could be trusted or if we were against gay people, they didn’t know. But instead of waiting for an informative and intelligent conversation, they just decided we’ll just kill her. It was very intense and I went through a couple of years of tough times with that until people really started to understand what we were trying to do.”

Of course, times have changed a lot in the last three decades when it comes to the understanding and treatment of AIDS. However, during an appearance at the Red Sea Film Festival in 2022, Stone recalled the impact that her involvement with the charity had on her career, and how long the fight took before she was able to feel she had achieved something good. At the time, she said:

“I had no idea of the resistance, cruelty, hate and oppression that we would face … “I stayed for 25 years until we had AIDS remedies being advertised on TV like we have aspiri. It did destroy my career. I didn’t work for eight years. I was told if I said condom again, funding would be removed. I was threatened repeatedly, my life was threatened, and I decided I had to stick with it.”