A month shy of her 60th milestone, Sharon Stone has got TV critics saluting her prowess. And I’m not talking about her ability to look not a day over 40, which she does by the way.
This screen siren is currently wowing everyone with her depiction of Olivia Lake in 'Mosaic'.
The series kicked off with a flashback to four years earlier when conman Eric Neill pursued her. Back to present day, he’s serving time for Olivia’s murder. And Petra (Eric’s sister) pushes to reopen the investigation.
Quite chuffed about the fact that she knows “whodunnit” in this six-part series, she says: “The murder scene was ruthless. When he loses his mind - it was just rough.”
Hlomla Dandala is thrilled to be part of #The River
Co-star Garrett Hedlund, who plays Joel Hurley, an aspiring artist living on her property, adds: “Yes, and you had to do that twice. Those scenes are never fun but also it’s kind of funny. Everybody always asks how fast can you slip out of the character and can you do that easily? Sometimes you say, ‘Yes’, and sometimes things are a little more strenuous.
But there’s no difference between having an argument with a family member or with yourself for a full day. Sometimes you sleep amazingly, sometimes you sleep horribly and you toss and turn, but it’s the same, psychologically.”
He adds: “On the last film I did, there was a scene that I shot with Forest Whitaker - it’s a baptism and it’s the very end of the film. I’m in a creek in November, south of Atlanta, and over the weekend they had said that they had lost all the footage, so we had to go back and do it again.
This guy’s racist and he has to confront all these black people around him and apologise to everybody for what he’d done. He says: ‘We’ve got to reshoot on Monday’. We got two takes in and one of the girls dropped of a seizure.”
A post shared by Sharon Stone(@sharonstone) on Jan 22, 2018 at 6:40pm PST
On agreeing to be in this series, Stone shares: “Well, since we’re being honest, if Steven Soderbergh had asked me to come and read the phone book I’d probably do it. But I feel really, really lucky that he asked me to do something that was so personal and so raw and so revealing because, quite frankly, I’ve been through hell and I had a lot to bring. It was really great to be able to bring all of that compassion and insecurity to the screen.”
When asked about her nerves due to her personal illness, she reveals: “Well, I lost my memory. I lost my short and long term memory when I had the stroke, and it took me a long time to recover because I had a photographic memory before and I had to learn to learn. Then as my brain started getting it back together, I started to get it back, but I didn’t have my old acting process. I mean, I was such a hot shot. I was just like, ‘Let’s go’. Now, I was like, ‘I don’t have a plan, I don’t have a process, and I don’t know what I’m doing’. It was just a whole different thing, and it was fantastic to bring all of that and to play a character in which I didn’t have to hide any of it.”
“Ed (Solomon) wrote those incredible dialogues for me, that she can just say all this crazy shit and it seems like it could be so mean, but her intention just isn’t mean,” she adds.
Hedlund quips: “I thought she was an angel.”
Of his own character, he notes: “He’s a fish in a fishbowl of something that’s just the wrong bowl. He’s in the wrong place. He’s seeking inspiration. He’s seeking almost mentorship within this arena of his life but he’s also flawed with his inability to direct his potential.”
Reflecting on her character’s focus - or lack thereof (to be more accurate), she says: “I think she’s frozen. She’s really like that environment that she’s in, that frigid environment. I think that’s like a reflection of her internal space. She’s a little bit in that weird pristine frozen space.”
Mosaic is a wonderfully woven suspense with fallible characters that resonate with viewers.
* Mosaic is on M-Net (DStv Channel 101) on Wednesdays at 9pm.