Sharon Stone on being more than a pretty face
Q: With so much buzz over the years with Linda Lovelace and Deep Throat, and the zeitgeist of the political and pop culture of the world, what is the mystique of these characters that led you to this project?
I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania in the farm countries, so I didn’t really have any big idea of who she was. Of course, I’d heard her name, I heard a few references and so forth, but when I read the script, a couple of things happened. One, I knew of these directors, because of my involvement as an AIDS worker, and there are beautiful films about the making of the American Quilt, and the Harvey Milk story, were just so special. And that’s a kind of special integrity to me. And then I read the script. The script is so good and it stands on its own as a very good script. Then this part, I had been offered to play mothers before, but I didn’t want to just take a stunt mum, ‘Oh, there’s Sharon playing a mum; great stunt casting.’ I wanted to play a mother with some meaning and for me, this cycle of dysfunction in a family is meaningful and it’s intriguing to look at because, metaphorically and cinematically, this gives it quite a powerful punch to see it play out in this way. To see that this mother, though she can look villainous, she was doing the best that she could with what she had and what she knew and coming from a dysfunction in her own past, she made mistakes, but she was still that woman that got dinner on the table every night and there was still family meals, and she was still trying and still loving her husband and still working hard. And so even though she failed, she still succeeded. She was still loving her daughter and she still was growing and learning and realising as this was happening, and as her daughter was standing up for herself, she was growing, too, in that movement of women’s rights. The things today we are still fighting and striving to maintain, and it’s funny that this is much later, but we are still struggling to keep those rights and so I felt that though it was a story in the 70s, it was still so relevant today. So there are many aspects of the story, these great actors such as Peter Sarsgaard and I thought there were just so many elements about this particular project that made it really wonderful and worthwhile.
