Sharon Stone is a phenomenally talented actor who’s seen the ups and downs of the film industry. She was one of the biggest stars alive when she top-lined the blockbuster “Basic Instinct” in 1992, and probably should’ve won the Oscar for Best Actress as Ginger McKenna in Martin Scorsese’s “Casino” three years later (though, to be fair, it was a ridiculously competitive year — her competition was Emma Thompson in “Sense and Sensibility,” Meryl Streep in “The Bridges of Madison County,” Elisabeth Shue in “Leaving Las Vegas,” and the ultimate winner, Susan Sarandon in “Dead Man Walking”). Stone’s star faded for a while, but she’s threatening to become something of a force again via her feisty villainess in Timo Tjahjanto “Nobody 2” and her upcoming appearance in Marc Maron’s Academy Awards comedy “In Memoriam.”
I’ve every belief that Sharon Stone has an Oscar-winning performance in her, but she might have a skill that is of greater use to the public — and it’s one that quite possibly saved lives on the set of “Nobody 2.” It might sound nutty, but Stone apparently possesses a meteorological sixth sense.
Stone sensed a tornado in the making from the direction of the rain and the wind-blown grass
/Film’s Russell Murray recently attended a Q&A event for “Nobody 2” featuring Bob Odenkirk and Sharon Stone, where the latter, always a chatty Cathy (in an endearing way) when presented with a microphone, regaled the attendees with the harrowing tale of how she instinctively identified that a tornado was about to touch down near the set of the film.
According to Stone, she’d just touched down in Winnipeg, Manitoba (home of the NHL’s Winnipeg Jets and the only city on the planet where Brian De Palma’s cult classic “Phantom of the Paradise” was a hit during its theatrical release) and was being driven to set when she noticed Mother Nature was up to something. This led to a bizarre exchange with her driver that went a little something like this:
“I get in my car, I’m driving out and it starts raining – except the rain starts coming down [sideways]. I’m thinking, ‘Hey, that’s odd.’ Then the rain starts kicking up, and I say to my driver, ‘Hey, can you roll down the windows?’ He said, ‘Yeah, why?’ I go, ‘I want to see the grass. I want to see how the wind’s going through the grass.'”
The driver seemed, to be kind, perplexed, but he did as requested, and was likely alarmed by what Stone told him next. Per the star of “Sliver”:
“So I’m looking at the grass, and I go, ‘You know what? I think we’re going to have a tornado.’ He’s like, ‘What?’ I say, ‘You see how the wind’s going through the grass in an ‘s’ pattern and the rain’s coming down sideways?’ He goes, ‘Yeah.’ I go, ‘That’s tornado weather. I think we’re driving into a tornado.’ He says, ‘Should we turn around?’ [I say] ‘No, I don’t think so. You’re supposed to keep driving.'”
The driver got them safely to set, where Stone promptly reported to the hair-and-makeup trailer. Within 90 seconds of her arrival, there’s a knock at her door. It’s a crew member informing her that they’re “expecting a tornado,” and that they’d like her to shelter in place. But Stone was having none of this. So she temporarily took the reins of the production and demanded a different course of action.
Sharon Stone had never seen a tornado before
As Stone explained to the Q&A audience, the facility they’d been driven to was “a swimming pool pavilion out in the middle of nowhere. There’s two locker rooms and an inside swimming pool. The swimming pool area is all glass, and the locker rooms are all concrete.” To her mind, the safest place to ride out the twister was inside the concrete locker rooms. Again, Stone was convinced that everyone thought she was crazy, but she correctly felt that hunkering down in a trailer was a foolish option. “I said, ‘No f***ing way! This thing is going to go up like cotton candy. I’m not staying out here. Nobody’s staying out here.'” When the film’s producer asked if she was serious, Stone shot back, “I am serious as a heart attack” — at which point she briefly paused her story to apologize to co-star Bob Odenkirk, who suffered a heart attack in 2021 on the set of “Better Call Saul.”
Stone was not crazy. After she had herded everyone to safety, she ventured outside of the locker room and stood with the producer as they watched the tornado touch down. As she said at the Q&A:
“[I’m] standing outside with the producer, and now I’m like, ‘I’ve never seen a tornado.’ And he’s like ‘I’ve never seen one either. Do you think it’s going to hit us?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know. It’s coming our way.’ And we’re just watching this tornado, this gigantic brown tornado coming right at us. And it just comes like this, and it starts to curve and I’m like, ‘It’s curving. It’s gonna miss us.’ And he’s like, ‘Yep, it is.’ And I’m like, ‘What are we gonna do?’ And he’s like, ‘Watch it.’ And we’re just standing there shoulder to shoulder as this tornado just curves and goes by us. It was unbelievable.”
Given the drastic cuts President Donald J. Trump has made to the National Weather Service (they’re now rehiring hundreds of these people because the people who made the cuts were imbeciles who had no idea how the organization functioned), perhaps we should make Sharon Stone our Weather Czar.