No one in Hollywood has a career quite like Sharon Stone’s, and that same distinction can be made about her personal life. The actress added turning 68 years young (in a bikini) to a slew of other accolades and accomplishments she's earned over the years, but one of her most noteworthy experiences skews far more harrowing than celebratory, and has nothing to do with any of her on-screen projects. It does involve a scary-as-all-balls Komodo dragon, though.
The actress went back in action for 2025’s Nobody 2 ahead of hitting the 2026 TV lineup as part of Euphoria Season 3, but it’s her tumultuous 2001 trip to the Los Angeles Zoo that has racked up votes and comments on a TIL Reddit post just under 25 years since it went down. The post links back to a Smithsonian article titled “The Most Infamous Komodo Dragon Encounters of the Century,” which is hilarious, but could absolutely be the title of the scariest horror movie of any given year. And that cites a very detailed 2001 Time interview that Stone gave two weeks after.
So what happened? The bare-bones version is: Stone’s ex-husband Phil Bronstein (executive editor of the San Francisco Examiner) had never seen a Komodo dragon in person before, and Stone trusted a reportedly not-so-trustworthy zookeeper to allow Bronstein a close audience with the largest living lizard species on the planet. Suffice to say, it went poorly. But Stone’s version has to be heard before we get into those who only recently discovered this awfulness went down.
Phil didn’t know where we were going or why we were going there. It was a complete surprise. So we came around the corner and he was like, ‘Oh my god this is so fabulous, I’ve always wanted to see this.’ And the zookeeper said, ‘would you like to go in the cage? It’s very mild mannered. Everybody goes in there. Kids pet him. It’s fine.’ I thought, well I’m not going in there. I want to go to the bunny cage. But I thought, well this is so neat, he gets to go in. So he went in and he started petting the dragon.
Sharon Stone
Sounds fairly satisfying so far, right? Especially with all the reassurances from the zookeeper, who then offered up a catastrophic piece of advice. Stone continued:
It started darting out at Phil’s shoes. The zookeeper said, ‘I’m sure he think it’s the white rats that we feed him. You’d probably be better off without your shoes.’ I thought they’ve got it all under control. Because we had no real experience with these animals, we didn’t know. . . . So Phil gets in the cage and he’s petting the dragon and I took a picture. The zookeeper, who was also in the cage, said, ‘Come around to the side a little bit so she can get a better picture,’ and as he started to move, this thing just lunged at him, grabbed his foot.
Sharon Stone
Yep, this was almost the point at which panic began to set in, but not before Stone said there was a brief period of disbelief where the three of them stared in shock. Then came the panic, as well as several panic-worthy moments happening in short and quick order. She said instead of trying to pull his foot back out of the lizard's mouth, which could have caused it to lunge at another part of his body, Bronstein wisely stepped down and pinned the creature's jaw to the ground. Not that it just laid there willingly. She continued:
When he pinned it down with his heel, so that it couldn’t continue to maul him, it started to throw its body, slam its body back and forth, to try to maul him, to try to eat his foot. It took a piece of the top of his foot off completely, like probably a 4-inch long by an inch and a half, maybe two inches wide, all the flesh. It severed the main tendon to his big toe, the main tendon to the next toe, crushed the casing to the joints that join the big toe to the foot. So its bacteria was then inside the bone. This thing carries 22 deadly bacteria in its mouth. His toe was completely hanging off, and we didn’t know if he would keep his toe...
Sharon Stone
Adding to this nightmare was the fact that the trio was being viewed behind glass by other zoo visitors, including young children, who watched as the star of Basic Instinct and Total Recall screamed in fear while a Komodo dragon made lunch out of a man's foot. The trio had to make their way out of the cage safely, without letting the Komodo escape, while Stone had to fashion a tourniquet to wrap around her husband's lower leg. And it's not like the lizard was calmly resting after that ordeal, either.
Needless to say, it was an emergency that she'll likely never forget, in the same way that the internet won't. Speaking of, here's an assortment of comments that made me smile and/or chuckle in good humor.
Some Choice Reddit Reactions To Learning This Story
- A+++!! 9 toes up! Would go again!! - @kuhas
- Unfortunately Phil's feet were white too. It was a critical miscalculation on the zookeeper's part. - @BobTulap
- He ignored his Basic Instincts. - @theRealGermanikkus
- He remembers that day well, with total recall - @killeronthecorner
- Was the handler just two Komodo dragons in a trench coat? - @NoGamble_NoFuture
- “Excuse me, Mr. Stone, are you trying to seduce me?” - The Dragon, probably. - @BrainCane
- AMA Request: a kid who saw Sharon Stone's then-husband get attacked while petting a Komodo dragon. - @Khaeos
- All giant lizards are pettable once - @GLaDOS_Sympathizer
- Valentine's Day present, hug the lions. - @maverickLI
Thankfully, Phil Bronstein did make it through the ordeal mostly intact, and the tendons were reattached surgically. It's assumed he never made any personal visits to any other Komodo dragons, though the actress states in the Time interview that the zoo continued to allow people to have up-close experiences with such carnivores.
Sharon Stone was at the top of her game in Sam Raimi’s under-appreciated western The Quick and the Dead, and I have to wonder how Ellen McKenzie would have handled the situation. I mean, she probably would have eliminated the threat before it could even become one. If James Bond can do it in Skyfall, The Lady sure can.
Here’s hoping neither Stone nor Bronstein anyone else ever has to go through an experience like that again, especially not under the guise of a surprise gift.
