“Lorne (Michaels) is a wonderful person,”. “You guys have much closer relationships with him than I do. But he personally saved my life.”
Wait, what? saved life? It gets more bonkers than that — Stone means it literally. And it happened during a live show. “I came out to do the monologue live, which is always super scary,” Stone told Spade and Carvey. “And a bunch of people started storming the stage saying they were gonna kill me during the opening monologue.”
The monologue on SNL’s YouTube channel is reportedly from the dress rehearsal, but the live show had the potential to turn into chaos. , protesters from a queer activist group were in the audience and began a loud chant: “Fight AIDS, not women!” It wasn’t the first time Stone had faced protesters over her performance in Basic Instinct, a movie that some believed portrayed LGBT characters in a negative light.
The actual sequence of events in Stone’s version is a little confusing, but she says SNL staff did little at first to stop people from rushing the stage. “The police that are always in there and the security that’s always in there froze because they’d never seen anything like that happen,” she explained. “And Lorne started screaming, ‘What are you guys doing? Watching the fucking show?’”
Then a battle royale broke out. “Lorne himself started beating up (the protesters) and pulling these people back from the stage,” Stone claimed. “And the stage manager looked at me and went, ‘Hold for five.’ And I thought he meant five minutes, but he meant five seconds. And so, all these people were getting beat up and handcuffed right in front of me. And we went live, and I was doing this live monologue while they were handcuffing and beating up people at my feet.”
While some outlets reported that the protest was about Basic Instinct’s insensitive portrayal of queer characters, Stone believes they were actually angry about her AIDS activism. “They didn’t understand what was really happening,” she told Carvey and Spade. “And they didn’t know if amfAR (the Foundation for AIDS Research) could be trusted or if we were against gay people. And so instead of waiting for an informative, intelligent conversation, they just decided, ‘Well, we’ll just kill her.’”
The rest of the show was nearly as frightening, Stone maintained. Even though the protesters were arrested, she still had to run through the audience to change costumes during the show. “I was just terrified,” she said. “I honestly blacked out for half of the show.”
Carvey had the same reaction that I did upon hearing the story: Lorne Michaels was throwing hands with the protesters? Stone doubled down, saying that she didn’t know the exact number of agitators, but “it was enough that Lorne was in there physically trying to contain them himself.”
Wow! It’s hard to imagine that some enterprising camera operator didn’t capture some of the brawl on tape. If this footage exists — please, God, make the footage exist — next year’s Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary show just got a little more exciting.