INTERVIEW – You Can Count on Sharon Stone: Screen icon on how “Basic Instinct” influenced her LGBTQ activism, acting with Ellen and what her dad meant to her gay friends

That scene. You know the one: the one in Basic Instinct where Sharon Stone’s legs are open. It’s been talked about and talked about, and talked about some more. It’s been talked about so much in the years since it shook the world in 1992 that it has diminished the other non-crotch facets of Sharon Stone.
What nobody talks about anymore is her heart, her courage and her activism. As Stone pushed through the male-dominating Hollywood sphere of the 1990s to reach top-tier cinematic heights through her work in 1990’s Total Recall and then Basic Instinct, an Oscar nomination for  Casino solidifying her influential screen presence, she was giving a voice to the voiceless. She was speaking up for marginalized women. She was speaking up for the LGBTQ community. She was speaking up for herself.
And to this day, she still does.
Stone’s enduring affinity with the LGBTQ community might explain why working for the first time with Ryan Murphy, known for bringing actresses over 50 (Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, and now Stone) into his lavishly stylized queerverse of prestige TV, was so special. In Murphy’s dark dramedy Ratched for Netflix, an origins story of Nurse Ratched of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the 62-year-old actress portrays the deliciously insane Lenore Osgood, a rich, twice-widowed mother who’d rather spend time with her Capuchin monkey than her queer son (played by openly gay actor Brandon Flynn). The series also stars out actresses Sarah Paulson, as nurse Mildred Ratched, and Sex and the City star and political activist Cynthia Nixon, who portrays Gwendolyn Briggs, the press secretary for the Governor of California.
When I spoke with Stone recently by phone, she did talk about the show’s queerness. But it was the touching story of her late father, Joe, who took her gay friends under his wing, that you won’t forget.
GayCalgary: Where do you think your role as Lenore Osgood will rate on the "Things Queer People Love That I’ve Done" scale?
Sharon Stone: Right? (Laughs.) I have to say that it’s full of beauty and full of style and full of the immense tenderness that happens when we confront abuse. And because of the nature of what it is to live a queer life, I think all of that will be very moving.
 
GC: While watching Ratched, I was reflecting on your LGBTQ roles. There’s...