The 61-year-old actress performed the scene upon receiving GQ's Woman of the Year award.
After nearly three decades, Sharon Stone sees her iconic scene in Basic Instinct a little differently.
At the 2019 GQ Men of the Year Awards in Berlin, Germany, on Thursday, Stone was honored with the Woman of the Year award, and had a chair brought out to the stage in order to demonstrate the scene that she says "changed my life."
"Some years ago, before we were allowed to be who we were in our little towns, I was sitting on a soundstage and my director said, ‘Can you hand me your underpants? Because we’re seeing them in the scene and you shouldn’t have underpants on. But we won’t see anything,'" Stone recalled. "And I said, 'Sure.'"
The 61-year-old actress then instructed the audience to cross and uncross their legs while she did the same onstage, mimicking her scene from the 1992 erotic thriller, which also starred Michael Douglas.
“I didn’t know that this moment would change my life,” she said of the role that earned her a Golden Globe nomination. “So, what I’d like you all to do is put your feet flat on the floor like mine, all of you, and I want you to join me in a moment that changed my life. Ready, set, go.”
“Do you feel empowered?” Stone asked continuing to cross and uncross her legs. “Maybe not. Let’s do it again.”
“Each and every one of you is going to have a moment like mine -- a moment that changes your life,” she explained. “One you might be aware of when it's happening and one you might not."
The actress' speech then started to sound more like a TED talk as she discussed the importance of women being respected in the industry.
“But I'll tell you this: You're going to have one if you haven't had it already. And you’re going to be held accountable for it, if you haven’t already. And people are going to ask you a lot of difficult questions, if they haven’t already. So the time to decide who you are is now. The time to decide what you do with the tender, important, beautiful, savage, passionate, most important part of yourself. What are you going to do with it?" she asked the audience.
"I’ll tell you what I did with mine," she added before crossing her legs again. "I respected it. And I would suggest that you all do the same. Because we have every right to be powerful in whatever form of sexuality we choose to have. And no one is allowed to take that away from you."
Stone then declared before crossing her legs once more, "I stand here as Woman of the Year, not as an individual, but to be with women and of women, and to be here in my grace and in my tenderness and in my dignity, and I want to tell you it was hard-won after I only did that."
The actress concluded, "I want to say thank you for choosing me to be Woman of the Year because there was a time when all I was was a joke."
Stone then stood up from her chair and was given a standing ovation for her message.
Back in 2017, Stone shared with her fans her Basic Instinct audition tape. Check it out:
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