After Actress Wins Battle To Get Film Removed From Circulation, Here Are 10 Stars Who Exposed Disturbing Scenes

Sharon Stone's most iconic scene in her five-decade Hollywood career was also the most challenging. 

In her 2021 memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, Stone revealed that she was misled about how the famous interrogation scene in Basic Instinct would be filmed. 

In the scene, Stone’s character, Catherine Tramell, sits in a police station in a white dress, being interrogated, and at one point uncrosses and recrosses her legs, revealing to the detectives that she is not wearing any underwear.

Stone revealed in her book that she was asked to remove her underwear by the director, Paul Verhoeven, but was assured her private parts would not be visible on camera. 

She found out the truth at the cast-and-crew screening of the movie:

“I’d been told, 'We can’t see anything — I just need you to remove your p**ties, as the white is reflecting the light, so we know you have p**ties on.’ Yes, there have been many points of view on this topic, but since I’m the one with the v***na in question, let me say: The other points of view are bull***it.”

She slapped Verhoeven after finding out, and called her lawyer, but later felt the need “to become objective” about the situation. 

“I can say that the role was by far the most stretching that I had ever done in terms of considering the dark side of myself,” Stone wrote. 

She also revisited how she had begun to sleepwalk during production, twice waking fully dressed in her car: “It was terrifying… I had hideous nightmares.”



After her book was released, Verhoeven denied the accusations in a 2021 interview with Variety.

“My memory is radically different from Sharon’s memory,” he argued. “That does not stand in the way and has nothing to do with the wonderful way that she portrayed Catherine Tramell. She is absolutely phenomenal. We still have a pleasant relationship and exchange text messages. But her version is impossible. She knew exactly what we were doing.” 

“I told her it was based on a story of a woman that I knew when I was a student, who did the crossing of her legs without p**ties regularly at parties. When my friend told her we could see her v****na, she said, ‘Of course, that’s why I do it.’ Then Sharon and I decided to do a similar sequence.”

In 2023, Stone revealed that the leg-crossing scene cost her the custody of her adopted son, Roan, whom she adopted with her then-husband, Phil Bronstein, in 2000. 

“I lost custody of my child,” she said on the Table for Two with Bruce Bozzi podcast. “The judge asked my child — my tiny little tiny boy — ‘Do you know your mother makes s** movies?’... I was considered what kind of parent I was because I made that movie.”

“I ended up in the Mayo Clinic with extra heartbeats in the upper and lower chambers of my heart,” she said. “It broke my heart.” 

She has two more children: Laird, adopted in 2005, and Quinn, adopted in 2006.

French actress Léa Seydoux and her co-star Adèle Exarchopoulos have publicly spoken multiple times about their “horrible” experience filming the 2013 queer romance drama Blue Is the Warmest Color.

Abdellatif Kechiche won a Palme d’Or for the film at Cannes 2013, but the global premiere quickly took a controversial turn as Seydoux broke down in tears during the press conference. 

The entertainment media outlets widely published the photo of her tear-stained face, and a detailed explanation for it came a few months later. 

In October 2013, Seydoux told Esquire that she cried at Cannes with relief at being done with the film and everything she had gone through with Exarchopoulos.

“It was a very emotional moment,” she said, and added that she was “embarrassed” over her reaction.

A month earlier, Seydoux and Exarchopoulos told The Daily Beast at the Telluride Festival, where the film had its US premiere, that Kechiche filmed their 10-minute intimate scene over 10 days and didn’t allow them to simulate blows during a fight scene. 

“In America, we'd all be in jail,” Seydoux said, describing an incident where her co-star’s hand got cut and was bleeding, but the director refused to halt filming. 

Around the same time, Seydoux told The Independent that the manner in which the scenes were filmed was “humiliating” for her and left her “feeling like a pro***tute.”

However, it wasn’t just the intimate scenes, but the overall experience that was quite traumatizing for Seydoux. 

In 2022, The Hollywood Reporter asked her whether the presence of an intimacy coordinator might have helped on set. 



“No, not really,” she said. “It was beyond. It was the whole film, not only the [intimate] scenes… The guy is just nuts.”

“It took a year of my life, and I gave everything for that film.”

More recently, at the 2026 Cannes, the Dune actress told Brut. that filming Blue Is the Warmest Color was “psychological harassment.”

She said her experience with Kechiche changed how she approached doing intimate scenes in the future, and she fought for her right to have a say in how her body was being portrayed. 

Several crew members also spoke up against grueling set conditions and working hours demanded by Kechiche. 

Spiac-CGT, the French union of film industry professionals, protested the film’s screening outside of Palais des Festivals at Cannes. 

“Our colleagues who worked on this film have reported to us revolting and unacceptable facts,” Spiac-CGT said in their statement.

Many crew members had even quit the job and allegedly came back “sickened, depressed, or because they were exhausted, or because they were pushed to the limit by production, or morally worn out by behaviors that in other sectors of activity would unambiguously be moral harassment."

Director Tim Burton brought on Michelle Pfeiffer to play Selina Kyle/Catwoman for his 1992 superhero film Batman Returns, a sequel to 1989’s Batman.

Annette Bening was originally set to play the character but had to drop out after becoming pregnant. 

Pfeiffer's portrayal made the Batman antagonist-love interest an iconic character for decades to come.
 
In one of the most famous scenes of the film, during a negotiation with Danny DeVito’s Penguin about Batman’s downfall, Catwoman puts one of his pet birds inside her mouth to blackmail him.
 
She holds it in until Penguin threatens to hurt one of her cats by holding a knife to its throat. The bird flies away as she opens her mouth. 

The bird, it was later revealed, was a live one, not CGI, digital, or even sedated.

In a 2017 conversation with The Hollywood Reporter to mark the film’s 25th anniversary, Pfeiffer admitted she hadn’t considered the risks of the stunt. 

“I look back and say, ‘What was I thinking?’ I could’ve gotten a disease or something from having a live bird in my mouth,” she said. “It seemed fine at the time. I don’t think the bird was drugged or anything.”

“We did that scene in one take. I think Tim likes to t**ture me a bit, it’s like a little brother [or] brat kind of thing.”

Burton himself was left immensely “impressed” by Pfeiffer’s dedication: “She had a live bird in her mouth while the camera was rolling.” 

“It was four or five seconds, and then she let it fly out. It was before CG, it was before digital. It was so quick, it seemed like it was an effect.”

“I hope she brushed her teeth for an hour and gargled ten bottles of mouthwash afterward,” one reader commented about the scene. 

Another said, “She is the scariest character in any Batman movie for me.”

Pfeiffer also detailed how the black latex gear she had to wear was a massive inconvenience and even restricted her bathroom trips at one point. 

“It was the most uncomfortable costume I’ve ever been in,” she admitted. “They had to powder me down, help me inside, and then vacuum-pack the suit.

“They’d paint it with a silicon-based finish to give it its trademark shine. I had those claws, and I was always catching them in things. The face mask was smashing my face and choking me…we had a lot of bugs to work out.”

“Originally, they didn’t leave me a way to use the restroom in the suit, so that also had to be remedied as well,” she added.

@academiadecinelatoma Michelle Pfeiffer se metió en la boca un ave, no se usó efectos de computadora para esa toma, nada de CGI ni animatronics! Batman Returns es una película de 1992 dirigida por Tim Burton. ¿Sueñas Cine? #vivecine #tomacine #20añoslatoma #catwoman #batmanreturns #batman #michellepfieffer ♬ sonido original - AcademiaDeCineLaToma

Loosely based on Daphne du Maurier’s short story of the same name, The Birds is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most renowned films, which launched the Hollywood career of Tippi Hedren. A year later, she starred in the director’s psychological drama, Marnie. 

Years later, it came to light that Hitchcock had made inappropriate advances toward Hedren during filming and restricted her career in the industry using an ironclad contract. 

Hedren shared parts of the story over the years, most memorably with the makers of the 2012 HBO TV film The Girl, which was based on her turbulent relationship with Hitchcock. She revealed more in her 2016 autobiography, Tippi: A Memoir.

“It's about time I stop letting everyone else tell my story and finally tell it myself,” she wrote.

Hedren was divorced and a single mother to future actress Melanie Griffith when Hitchcock cast her in The Birds after spotting her in a commercial, and then in Marnie. 

Hitchcock allegedly made it clear to her castmates that she was his “property” and warned her male co-stars, Rod Taylor (The Birds) and Sean Connery (Marnie), to stay away from her. One day, Hitchcock forced a kiss on her, she said, in front of cast and crew members. She screamed, shoved him off, and ran away.

The next day, Hedren was to film the famous scene in The Birds, in which her character, Melanie, tries to make a call from a phone booth amid a violent bird attack. Somehow, the mechanical birds broke the supposedly shatterproof glass of the booth, and shards found their way all over her face. 

Hedren said in her memoir that it might have been Hitchcock’s way of punishing her for “rejecting him and doing it so publicly.”

Another time, the director allegedly cornered her on the set and asked her to touch him. She also accused him of having her followed and analyzing her handwriting. 



The final blow came when Hitchcock used real ravens, doves, and pigeons to pelt her for the climactic scene in the bedroom. She trusted the trainer, Ray Berwick, but knew that “not even the greatest trainer in the world could control every move an animal makes, especially when it’s under stress.”

“It was ugly, brutal, and relentless,” she wrote. The sequence was filmed over five days, and the film’s crew reportedly found the final day the most “horrifying and heartbreaking.”

Cary Grant, who was visiting the set, told her, “You’re the bravest woman I’ve ever seen.”

On that day, a few birds were tied to her body, and one nearly pecked her eyes out, after which Hedren yelled, “I’m done.”

“The birds were untied from me, and I just sat there on the floor, unable to move, and began sobbing from sheer exhaustion.” 

She kept fading in and out of consciousness over the weekend and had to be awakened by her daughter at one point. She was under medical supervision for a week after passing out in her dressing room the next day.

However, there are some conflicting accounts on the filming of the bedroom sequence. Some who were on set at the time said that Hedren was never in real danger, was not injured, and that there was no tension on set. 

Regardless, Hedren essentially never spoke to Hitchcock again after the release of Marnie in 1964.

Hitchcock kept her bound to an exclusive multi-year contract she had signed before working on his movies, and continued to pay the $500 agreed-upon salary, preventing her from taking on other projects.

She told her granddaughter, Dakota Johnson, in a December 2016 Vogue issue, that Hitchcock’s last words to her were: “I’ll ruin your career.”

More than a decade before Jurassic Park, Sam Neill starred in Polish writer-director Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 film, Possession, alongside French actress Isabelle Adjani. 

The plot of the psychological horror drama followed Mark (Neill), an international spy, and his deteriorating relationship with his wife Anna (Adjani), who began exhibiting disturbing behaviors after asking for a divorce after having multiple affairs.

While both actors hold the movie in high regard, they have openly admitted that working with Żuławski was taxing. 

“I call it the most extreme film I’ve ever made, in every possible respect, and he asked of us things I wouldn’t and couldn’t go to now,” Neill told Far Out Magazine in 2021. “And I think I only just escaped that film with my sanity barely intact.” 

In his 2023 memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This?, Neill described Żuławski as a “handsome, charismatic, and wild filmmaker,” whom he “didn’t like very much.”

“What he saw as direction often was just downright bullying. But he had vision, he was a true cineaste. And they are rare,” Neill wrote. “Żuławski asked more of you than you could possibly give. There were times when he would scream, bellow at [Adjani] right in her face. It was distressing to see.”

Elsewhere in the book, he revealed that the director instructed him to make actual physical contact while filming a scene in which his character slaps Adjani’s, rather than just simulate it.

He refused to do it, saying, “I can’t do that. You can’t ask me to do that. I have never raised a hand to another human being, and I have to say no. Please don’t ask me to. I’m not going to do it.”



However, Adjani consented to it and told Neill that he “must do it.” 

“So I had to do it. I have to say it was the most distressing thing I’ve ever had to do on film,” The Piano actor said. 

He described the entire filming experience as “surreal” and “bizarre,” as they filmed in Berlin during the height of the Cold War.

Neill also mentioned that Adjani had a “breakdown” after the movie’s release.

The Tenant actress told French media at one point that Possession felt like a “psychological p****graphy” for her. 

“Żuławski is a director who makes you sink into his world of darkness and his demons,” she said. “It is okay when you are young, because you are excited to go there.”

“It was quite an amazing film to do, but I got bruised, inside out. It was exciting to do. There were no bones broken, but it was like, ‘How or why did I do that?’ I don’t think any other actress ever did two films with him.”

In a 2023 conversation with fellow actress Adèle Exarchopoulos for Interview magazine, Adjani revealed the long-lasting impact of the experience on her psyche. 

“There was something of great violence that I agreed to take on. But I’ve realized over the years that it’s something I could never accept again, and it’s part of everything that my subconscious has been swallowing and incubating,” she said. “I wonder if acting has been a bit unhealthy during certain periods of my life, no?”

“No art is worth actively harming the participants, and if you have to use extreme methods to get what you want, then that means you are bad at your job, in a technical sense and a moral one,” one netizen commented about Żuławski’s directorial approach.

Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 drama Last Tango in Paris, starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, was plagued with controversy nearly three decades after its release. 

The movie featured a scene in which Brando’s character, Paul, violated Schneider’s character, Jeanne, using butter as a lubricant. 

In a 2006 interview, Schneider revealed that the director did not disclose the full details of the scene to her before the day of the filming. 

“They only told me about it before we had to film the scene, and I was so angry,” she said. “I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can't force someone to do something that isn't in the script, but at the time, I didn't know that.”

“Marlon said to me, ‘Maria, don't worry, it's just a movie,’ but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn't real, I was crying real tears. I felt humiliated and, to be honest, I felt a little r**ed, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn't console me or apologize. Thankfully, there was just one take.”

She added that the film's aftermath left her “a little crazy” and that she had a breakdown as a result. 

She also joked that she stopped using butter to cook ever since she filmed the scene: “Only olive oil.”

In November 2016, a 2013 video of Bertolucci went viral in which he revealed that Schneider had been kept in the dark to elicit a more “realistic reaction” from her.

“In a way, horrible to Maria because I didn't tell her what was going on, because I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress,” he confessed.



The filmmaker admitted that he felt guilty about the decision, but did not regret it. He added that he knew Schneider “hated” him for the rest of her life over the scene. 

The revelation drew severe backlash from Hollywood A-listers, including Chris Evans, Jessica Chastain, and Rachel Wood.

“Wow. I will never look at this film, Bertolucci, or Brando the same way again. This is beyond disgusting,” Evans wrote. 

Bertolucci addressed his past comments in a December 2016 statement, clarifying what had actually entailed. 

“I would like, for the last time, to clear up a ridiculous misunderstanding that continues to generate press reports about Last Tango in Paris around the world,” he wrote, according to Variety. “

“Several years ago, at the Cinemathèque Francaise, someone asked me for details on the famous ‘butter scene.’ I specified, but perhaps I was not clear, that I decided with Marlon Brando not to inform Maria that we would have used butter. We wanted her spontaneous reaction to that improper use [of the butter]. That is where the misunderstanding lies.”

“Somebody thought, and thinks, that Maria had not been informed about the violence against her,” he continued. “That is false! Maria knew everything because she had read the script, where it was all described. The only novelty was the idea of the butter.”

Nicolas Cage is well-known for frequently doing his own stunts, and even got caught in a near-fatal surfing accident while training for The Surfer.

But if there is one experience that the Con Air star refuses to do again, it is eating live cockroaches, something he himself volunteered to do for Robert Bierman’s 1988 movie, Vampire’s Kiss. 

The cult comedy film saw Cage play Peter Loew, a young man who stubbornly believed he was bewitched and bitten by a vampire, played by Jennifer Beals, and began pretending to be one by wearing fake fangs and eating bugs.

In one scene, he grabs a cockroach, which struggles to get free from Cage’s grip, puts it inside his mouth, and chews vigorously.

In the DVD commentary for the film, Cage revealed that the original plan was for the character to swallow a raw egg, Rocky Balboa-style. It was his idea to raise the stakes.

“I saw it as a business decision because when people see the cockroach go in my mouth... [they] really react,” he said. 



In 2023, during a press junket for Count Dracula reimagination Renfield, Cage revisited the memory and called the experience “terrifying.”

“I’ll never do that again,” he told Yahoo Entertainment. “I’m sorry I did it at all.”

He also revealed that he had to eat two roaches back-to-back as Bierman insisted on a second take, but he believes the director did it as a “prank.” 

“This is the most disgusting thing ever,” one netizen commented about the scene. 

However, despite his regret, Cage also believes that eating bugs can be beneficial for the greater good.
 
“If you can get rid of your fear, your phobia of eating insects, you could solve world starvation — high protein, no fat, excellent nutrients, abundance — they’re everywhere,” he said. “Why not? But nope, not going to happen.”

Cage’s Renfield co-star Nicholas Hoult was also part of the interview. He detailed his experience eating potato bugs and other insects for the film, in which he played the titular character, Renfield, Count Dracula’s (Cage) long-suffering aide in centuries of servitude.

Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting were both teens — 16 and 17 years old, respectively — when they starred in Italian director Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet adaptation in 1968. 

The actors together sued Paramount Pictures in January 2023 for over $500 million, alleging unauthorized exposure of body parts in an intimate scene despite previous assurances that would not be the case. This happened right before the film received a home media re-release on Blu-ray following a 4K restoration. 

The lawsuit stated that Zeffirelli, who passed away in 2019, initially told them they would be wearing flesh-colored garments for the scene, but later said it would be only body makeup. He allegedly told them that the camera would be positioned so as not to show any private parts. 

However, in the final film, Whiting’s bare backside and Hussey’s bare chest are briefly visible.
 
The actors said they believed “they had no choice” when the director said the “picture would fail” if they removed the scene. 

This case was dismissed in May 2023 primarily due to the expiration of the statute of limitations.



The actors filed a second lawsuit against Paramount under laws prohibiting the non-consensual distribution of intimate images. They argued the 2023 high-definition re-release of the film constituted a new, unauthorized distribution.

The second lawsuit claimed that the new release contained CGI details on Hussey’s body, and that it “had been enhanced in a way to make those photographs appear to be of lewd and lascivious conduct, rather than an intimate love scene.

“I was convinced — and remain convinced — that Paramount engineered that release to embarrass me in retaliation for my participating in the 2022 lawsuit against them,” Hussey said at the time. 

Judge Holly J. Fujie of the Los Angeles County Superior Court dismissed the second lawsuit, finding that the actors had consented to participate in the film under their contracts. The judge noted the 2023 re-release did not differ significantly enough from the original to restart the statute of limitations.

In 2023, the director’s son, Pippo Zeffirelli, defended his father’s work, saying the intimate scene expressed “beauty” and “candor of mutual giving” and did not contain any “morbid feeling.”