Sharon Stone says she shelled out Leonardo DiCaprio‘s salary for “The Quick and the Dead.”
The Hollywood icon opened up about working on the film, which she also co-produced, and securing the future star’s role in the film in her memoir, “The Beauty of Living Twice.”
The movie sees Stone, now 63, play Ellen, a gunfighter who relocates to a rural town in the Old West and befriends DiCaprio’s character, simply called Kid.
Stone said that she and her fellow producers auditioned several young actors for the role.
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“This kid named Leonardo DiCaprio was the only one who nailed the audition, in my opinion: he was the only one who came in and cried, begging his father to love him as he died in the scene,” she wrote, per Insider.
Sharon Stone said she paid Leonardo DiCaprio’s salary for the film ‘The Quick and the Dead’ because the studio did not want to hire him. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/DMI/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)
However, Sony-owned TriStar Pictures wasn’t keen on hiring the pre-“Titanic” DiCaprio.
“‘Why an unknown, Sharon, why are you always shooting yourself in the foot?'” Stone recalled the studio telling her. “The studio said if I wanted him so much, I could pay him out of my own salary.”
She added: “So I did.”
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DiCaprio, now 46, wasn’t the only person Stone had to fight to include, as she also had to push the studio to hire director Sam Raimi to helm the project.
At the time, Raimi’s low-budget horror movies “The Evil Dead I” and “Army of Darkness” led the studio to believe the filmmaker was a “D-movie director,” Stone explained.
Sharon Stone worked as a co-producer on the 1995 Western film ‘The Quick and the Dead.’ She was at odds with the studio over Leonardo DiCaprio’s casting as Kid.
(Getty Images)
However, the sci-fi icon was hired after the actress told the studio he “would work nearly for free as an enticement.”
“The Quick and the Dead,” which also co-starred Russell Crowe and Gene Hackman, received mediocre reviews. Stone was nominated for a Saturn Award for her performance in the film.
Elsewhere in the book, she talked further about her difficulties in the realm of producing.
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“Getting a producer credit as an actress is often thought of in my business as a ‘vanity deal,’ meaning they pay you for the job but shut the f— up and stay out of the way,” she said. “I won’t accept a vanity deal and let them know that upfront. This is illegal, I say, and I like to work within the law. That gets a lot of silence and not a lot of joy on the other end.”
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Reps for Sony and DiCaprio did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment.