JAKE PICKING
The Hollywood star and film icon Sharon Stone talk Rock Hudson
Adashing young male actor set to become a household name meets one of the most famous female Hollywood icons of the past four decades on a boat in a sun- soaked Los Angeles harbour following his debut cover shoot for the world’s most popular gay magazine. If it sounds like a scene from Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood, the hit Netflix series that re- imagined the golden age of US filmmaking, it’s because it has the ingredients to be just that.
In Hollywood, Jake Picking, 29, plays an aspiring Rock Hudson on the cusp of becoming one of the US film industry’s most iconic actors. For those that ( forgive the pun) have been living under a rock, Hudson was a closeted gay man, which was something that 1950s America was certainly not ready for. ( Indeed, the movie industry today is still barely ready for its leading heartthrobs to be openly gay.)
With Jake is Sharon Stone, star of Total Recall, Basic Instinct and Casino, which bagged her a Golden Globe. She also boasts a Primetime Emmy Award and a further six nominations for other roles. Stone shares a connection with Jake in Rock Hudson, who she befriended when they appeared in 1984’ s The Vegas Strip War together. She was one of the last people to share the screen with the legend before his death from an Aids- related illness in 1985.
In another link in their chain, Stone is set to appear in her own Ryan Murphy show, Ratched, which drops on Netflix in September. This time, her co- star is a rather more diminutive figure in the form of a real capuchin monkey. More on that little critter later.
Despite her star power, Stone has experienced her own share of Hollywood oppression — whether it’s ageism after the lead roles dried up when she hit the infamous big 4- 0 cut- off point that plagues female actors ( despite being nominated for an Academy Award for Casino) or, as she tells Jake, being subjected to leering male co- stars during nude scenes.
Where Hollywood’s old system was broken and prejudiced, Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood celebrates those that the patriarchal, white male- dominated industry silenced — specifically, the voices of women, queer, and black people.
Sharon Stone: Did you go to college? Jake Picking: Yes. I went to NYU.
SS: What did you study?
JP: I was studying business and playing on the hockey team, but incessantly found myself skipping class to get involved in the acting programme. SS: Man, how did your parents feel about that? JP: My dad was the military guy. You know, when I said I wanted to be an actor, he was like, [ in a Boston accent] “What do you mean, prancing around in your underwears?” That was the first notion… SS: Yeah, my dad said, “You think you’re pretty chick.” My dad passed away 10 years ago and that’s still what we say to each other: “You think you’re pretty chick.”
JP: [ Laughing] Yeah, I ended up getting hurt playing hockey and had listened to my math teacher in high school, who said, “I don’t know if anyone can tell if you’re being serious or not, so you should try acting.” And I guess when I was messing around with my friends or joking around, I realised there was an ability there, the stakes were high, always.
So I took a class with a teacher in Boston who encouraged me to stick with it. She had worked with [ Matt] Damon and [ Ben] Affleck and I had looked up to them so much. SS: That’s a brilliant family. They put their issues, their pains, their stuff on the screen. Rob Reiner said to me one day, “To be a great actor, you don’t have to be in pain. You have to have been in pain.” And it’s pretty good if you can shake out of it and keep your life together and put your stuff on the screen.
JP: A hundred per cent. I watched an interview of yours and you were talking about deep, deep wells, you know, of life experience. I’m just so grateful to be able to sit down with someone that has such a great, not only career, but personal journey that I really respect, it’s inspiring.
SS: Which part? The mess I’ve made of most of my life? [ Laughs]
JP: [ Laughing] No, I mean, everything. In
2001, going through that and then having to relearn everything. [ Sharon Stone had a stroke in 2001.] SS: Not fun.
JP: I can only imagine.
SS: But interesting. When you get to rebuild your brain, you can make better choices. I mean, I even decided to discipline my mind. Maybe if I’m rebuilding my brain, it’s like a muscle. Maybe I should not even spend time on bad thoughts. Maybe I don’t have to have bad thoughts. And when I look at the me from before, I remember her, most of it, not all of it, but I remember her, but I don’t feel like I am her completely, you know? It’s a strange, strange sort of dual reality. We do really get to pick who we want to be in our life and career. I think that your choice to do this part, playing Rock Hudson in
Hollywood, the Ryan Murphy series, is a very cool choice because you got to re- imagine Rock. I knew Rock very well. I had the wonderful opportunity to be one of the last people to ever work with him on a movie [ in
The Vegas Strip War] with James Earl Jones, when I was quite young, maybe 23. Those are good teachers to have. Rock would call me every morning and tell me what to order him for breakfast. And he called me his little Dickens, “Hey, my little Dickens.” And he’d tell me what he wanted and he’d come over to my room and he would teach me my scenes while we had breakfast, every day. And I got up at, like, four o’clock in the morning and worked out before he called me to have breakfast because I was so excited that I was working with a legend. Then, after work, he took me out and he would have martinis. I never had a martini, you know, I was, like, some poor kid off the farm in Pennsylvania. I thought that was the biggest, most fancy deal in the freaking world. And then we’d walk down the strip in Vegas and he was, like, 6’ 5”, and I’d be looking up at him and the lights behind him. And I was like, “I’m walking down the strip in Las Vegas with Rock Hudson and we had a martini.”
JP: [ Laughs] That’s incredible. What an amazing experience that must have been. SS: Oh, it was just great. What you really did capture of him was how kind he was. He was the kindest person. To this day, no one in the business has ever been as kind to me as Rock. Absolutely kind and decent and genuinely loving. And I believe that if Rock had the opportunities that Ryan provided in the series and that you played, that he would have
“TO THIS DAY, NO ONE IN THE BUSINESS HAS BEEN AS KIND TO ME AS ROCK [ HUDSON]”
SHARON
“THINK POSITIVELY, BECAUSE LIFE IS JUST A CONSEQUENCE OF OUR THOUGHTS AND ACTIONS”
JAKE
been the guy that you played. He would have been that loving, that decent, that open. And his relationship with Elizabeth Taylor got to allow his intentions to live on through her. And then, ultimately, in some ways, through me. And I’m very, very grateful for what you did. I’m so grateful for that series, that people got to re- imagine what a kinder world could look like.
JP: Absolutely. When I first sat down with
Ryan [ Murphy], he wanted to capture that and Rock’s essence on his rise to stardom. You know, his kindness, his earnestness, and real innocence. In his first film, he took 38 takes to deliver his only line, but I mean, he went on to become a true legend. SS: Well, I can tell you I’ve worked with De Niro, and 38 takes is not that unusual. [ Laughs] You got to do as many takes as it took in order to find the truth.
JP: De Niro is one of my heroes. I remember filming the first day of Dirty Grandpa with him and originally it was supposed to be a lighter scene, but the shooting order changed and it was a scene where my character was yelling at him. So, I met my hero and then had to yell at him for several hours! [ Laughs] I watched an interview of yours where you were talking about working with [ acting coach] Roy London and you said that your number one goal was to sit opposite Robert De Niro and hold your own. And I mean, you more than did that in Casino; you were brilliant. That must have been liberating. SS: Well, it’s very, very liberating, but it’s not that liberating when you’re a 40- year- old woman in Hollywood and you do that and then everybody… there’s nowhere to go. Nobody hires you. You’re nominated for the Oscar for a Scorsese film opposite De Niro and then you don’t get any jobs because you’re 40. And everybody treats you like, every time you do a great job, it’s a fluke because you’re, like, the character in Basic
Instinct, a serial, sociopathic, lesbian killer, or somehow it’s a fluke that you work with De Niro and Scorsese.
My whole career has been about how all my performances are accidents. It’s the whole thing about the way women are marginalized. Especially if you’re beautiful, which when I was a young girl, I have now recognised that I was a beautiful young actress and that there’s a great deal of prejudicial behaviour about being talented and beautiful. And any degree of success was not something that was OK. You couldn’t be all that, and smart, too. It wasn’t OK. Now that I’m older, it’s like, it’s OK for me to be smart and have been beautiful or have had some successes. But now the
world is opening [ up]. You can be a woman, you can be gay, you can be of colour, but we’re fighting for all these things. We’re fighting in the streets as people in positions of power are still really overtly trying to suppress women, gays and people of colour.
JP: I think there are so many qualities that make up a human being, and to initially judge someone, in any way, based on who they are, or who they love, or what their skin colour is, is closed- minded and toxic. I read somewhere, that a secret isn’t real unless it’s painful to hold on to, and I feel like that’s what Rock was doing with his truth and there is a tragedy in that. Not being able to express who you are. SS: That it’s still a battle in 2020 to just simply get to be who you are and any of the gifts that
God gave you and the uniqueness of you, it’s appalling to me. And I think it’s brave that you, a straight man, went and played this incredibly tender gay character.
JP: I hope the show is encouraging. The war is still being waged today for women and people of colour and members of the LGBTQ community. I think the show [ Hollywood] is triumphant and, hopefully, the audience will garner an empathy for these characters. And I think when Ryan was weaving in these amalgamations or fictional narratives… I think we’re hoping for change and looking, like you said, at things in a positive light. Why not choose, if you have the choice, to think positively because really, not to get too deep, but that’s what life is — just a consequence of our thoughts and actions. SS: Thoughts make actions. JP: And behaviour can really influence your thoughts, too. SS: I think you get a different understanding of the other dimension of life and death when you portray people that have been here. I don’t know what happened to you when you were playing Rock, did you feel him with you?
JP: I’d like to think so, yeah. I initially connected with Rock’s loneliness that he described. When he first moved to LA, he would stand alone in his uniform in front of the studio gates, hoping for a connection to the business, or a helping hand, you know. I was feeling that. When I first moved to LA, I was alone. I went from the busy- ness of New York City, to a one- room studio apartment next to a retirement home. I definitely went through a period of existential angst and I watched a lot of classic films; one of them was Pillow Talk [ starring Rock Hudson]. It was really just a healthy form of escapism. But, to be honest, I want to say the prosthetics helped, too. I was, like, at first, is this necessary? But then you immediately realise when you put them on how different you feel and, in no cheesy way,
“THERE IS A TRAGEDY IN NOT BEING ABLE TO EXPRESS WHO
YOU ARE”
JAKE
let something else take over. I feel like I just want Rock to be happy and, you know, root for the sentiment that the show stands for, I think. I also feel, you know, pretty guarded or irked speaking on the behalf of someone. SS: What was it like to do your first kissing scene with a man? Were you nervous? Were you shy? JP: It was nerve- wracking, but I was willing, of course. I think Jeremy [ Pope] knew the level of seriousness that I wanted to take part in. SS: Your generation is actually more comfortable than my generation was. Because I did If These Walls Could Talk with Ellen DeGeneres and it was the first time that a lesbian relationship was put on television. And it was written in the script that we start kissing and then the lights go out and you hear sounds and you wake up and the lamp was broken and, like, the bedding is all on the floor. And I said, “It looks more like there was a robbery, than we had a sexual relationship, and this cannot be how we present lesbian love- making. How come we’re breaking up the furniture? This doesn’t make sense.” I think we needed them to leave the lights on and have a sexual encounter. But [ I remember thinking] I don’t know how to do that because I haven’t been in this situation, and I’m really nervous and I’m afraid I don’t know what to do.
JP: I had those same feelings. I just tried to block that out. SS: I would say, “What if I fuck it up, and what if I’m not doing it right?”
JP: I had those same questions.
SS: It was Anne Heche who was directing, who was her [ Ellen’s] girlfriend at the time. So we all met in Ellen’s trailer and we all had a drink, because we were all scared [ laughs].
JP: We had a chance to meet, like, a week in advance, just kind of sharing our personal stories and there was also an intimacy coordinator on set.
SS: Wow! JP: Yeah, which I had never had before: “Is this OK? Is this all right?” All that. And that was almost more uncomfortable for me, honestly, than doing the scene itself. Because you’re not the character at that point, you’re just yourself. And I feel like I’m just more comfortable being someone else, rather than just being myself. SS: They didn’t have that in my day. When I did my first movie, which was Irreconcilable
Differences, I had a topless scene. And they didn’t even clear the set. Everybody’s on set, like a million people on the set. And I take off my top and this actor screams, “Would you get out of the fucking way? I can’t even see her tits.”
JP: Oh my God.
“JIM [ PARSONS] WAS A TRUE FRIEND — SOMEONE I CAN
COUNT ON”
JAKE
SS: Right? And I’m so terrified. You know when you can hear your heartbeat in your ears? That’s all I could hear. And I hear him scream, “Get out of the way. I can’t see her fucking tits.” I’m just like, talk about no intimacy coordinator.
JP: That is absolutely atrocious.
SS: Oh my God. It was such a nightmare. I mean, when they asked me if I had any # MeToo [ experiences]. [ Laughs]
JP: I can’t even imagine. Unfortunately, the abuse of power is probably always going to be relevant. SS: In every business.
JP: In every industry.
SS: Yeah, I don’t think it’s to do with the Hollywood situation. An intimacy coordinator to me sounds like someone who comes in on little wings and is like… JP: Yeah, it’s completely luxurious. [ Laughs]
SS: Yeah, helpful. JP: It is. He was great. That’s what it is, it felt safe, it was a safe territory. He was on set with certain scenes with Jim [ Parsons] and I, too, with scenes that didn’t even make the edit. He [ Parsons] truly is completely opposite of the character he was playing. He’s wonderful. SS: Oh, he’s one of my favourite actors. JP: He was incredible, he really was. And also a true friend and someone I can count on and trust. Everyone is terrific, really. It’s just such an honour to be a part of that. I mean anything Ryan Murphy does…
SS: We have Ratched coming out soon.
JP: Yeah! I can’t wait for that!
SS: Judy Davis is… Well, she’s already one of the greatest living legends and, of course, Sarah Paulson and Cynthia Nixon. Everybody is just, well, first of all, it’s hilarious. It’s horrifying, and hilarious. It’s true Ryan Murphy. It’s not quite as poignant as your show, but it really is fun and good. And I have a monkey on my shoulder the entire performance. A real capuchin monkey. JP: How does that work? Do you guys train together? SS: The monkey came over to my house in advance and we got to be friends, and we spent time hanging out together a few times before the show started because he really was my co- star. I have scenes where it’s just me and the monkey.
JP: That is awesome.
SS: The monkey is. I mean, I really came to adore that monkey and the monkey was truly a great actor. And I learned a lot about acting from the monkey.
JP: And I know you’re being serious.
SS: I am and, talk about being present: if you’re not present with a wild animal on your shoulder, you’re in serious shit.
Hollywood is available now on Netflix Ratched will be available on Netflix in September