Sharon Stone says Lorne Michaels "saved her life" after protestors stormed her SNL monologue
Stone recounted the story of the SNL creator's unexpected, action-packed heroism during a podcast conversation with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Sharon Stone painted an unexpectedly heroic portrait of Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels during a podcast appearance this week, describing an incident in which Michaels—whose various descriptors in pop culture do not normally include the phrase “action-packed”—apparently moved swiftly to “save her life” when protestors tried to storm the stage while Stone was delivering an SNL monologue in 1992.
This is per the latest episode of Dana Carvey and David Spade’s Fly On The Wall podcast, in which the duo of former SNL stars had Stone on as their guest. (Including a moment when Carvey formally apologizes for a sketch from her episode, where he plays an Indian man forcing Stone to strip to go through airport security; Stone didn’t sound all that bothered by it, honestly.) The most shocking part of the interview, though, came when Stone described an incident where, during her monologue, a group of protestors “stormed the stage, saying they were going to kill me.” She then describes Michaels screaming at his crew and security to stop “watching the fucking show” before physically restraining protestors himself. And then they went live on TV!
Although it’s not in evidence on the official SNL YouTube broadcast of Stone’s monologue—a pretty basic, uh, Basic Instinct riff that features Michaels alongside several crew members leering at Stone while she recreates the film’s most famous scene—you can find reports of the incident from the time. Six people were apparently arrested, after infiltrating the show’s set by dressing and acting like production crew. In the podcast interview, Stone says they were protesting her early work with AIDS—due to early skepticism that organizations like The Foundation For AIDS Research were actually working on behalf of people with the disease—although spokespeople at the time said they were protesting the “homophobia and misogyny” of Hollywood, due to Basic Instinct’s depiction of a bisexual woman as a depraved serial killer.
Anyway, please enjoy the mental image of Lorne Michaels wading into the fray, five whole seconds before the show’s cameras apparently went live. He apparently extended Stone a standing offer to return to the show, possibly out of apology—but for some reason, she never took him up on it.