Sharon Stone has stopped smoking marijuana.

His journey to cutting ties with cannabis began when he was prescribed several medications after suffering a near-fatal stroke in 2001.

“I stopped taking one of the medications I was taking for my stroke last September and was told I couldn’t stop,” Stone tells me. “They said, ‘You can’t quit. You can never quit.’ I thought, ‘I’m quitting,’ and it was like quitting fucking heroin. I was really sick for four and a half months. I just thought, ‘I want my life back.’ I had quit most of the drugs over the years that I’d been prescribed. But I thought, ‘I want a drug-free life.'”

She continues, “Once I stopped that, I decided I was going to stop smoking marijuana. And because I think they put so many things in it now (they really do), when I stopped smoking marijuana, I got sick too. It’s not like you’re pulling it out of the ground anymore. It’s not like when we were kids. I got pretty sick for a month. I went to my neurologist and he said, ‘Sharon, I’ve had people die in the emergency room because of marijuana.'”

Stone is sitting by the pool at her property in Beverly Hills on a Monday afternoon. A few minutes earlier, I saw her painting on a large canvas in a guest house she has converted into an art studio. At the same time, photographer Tyler Chick is photographing her for the digital magazine Nineteen92. The day is also being narrated by a group of young people from Social Network Studios, a social media branding and management company founded by his eldest son, Roan, who manages Stone’s social media.

“I had four or five million followers.” [on Instagram]but not as much engagement,” Stone says. Roan checked his feed. “I have millions in engagement now.”

But that also meant that Roan had to modify who he followed. “People wrote me nasty letters. Why don’t I follow them anymore?” says stone. “People were outraged because they weren’t being followed anymore, as if this was a real relationship. As if I had a personal relationship with someone I followed on Instagram, someone I had never met.”

While Stone’s painting career has taken off in recent years, the art form is not new to her. The Pennsylvania native studied fine arts in college before dropping out to pursue a career in modeling. “I went to New York with $50 and a suitcase,” he says.

The creative spark was rekindled during the COVID lockdown. What started as a few canvases and some paintings in his bedroom became an obsession that sometimes lasted around the clock. Before she knew it, Stone transformed her bedroom into a makeshift art studio. “I took out all the furniture in my bedroom. Before long, I gave it away and bought a small bed,” Stone recalls. “I lived in a French artist’s loft with a bed in front of the fireplace. I had a beautiful bedroom, but I put nails in the wall like I wasn’t living in this beautiful house. I just put nails in this beautiful wall. I started buying bigger canvases. I brought a big table up there. I threw sheets on the floor. Months and months and months went by.”

His sons, Roan and his brothers, Laird and Quinn, became concerned and intervened. “They come in and say, ‘Mom, we think you should wear a bra,’” Stone says. “I thought, ‘This is the same conversation my dad had with me in the ’70s.’ It didn’t work then. I’m not going to work now. Thank you for your concern. Have a beautiful day.”

They were able to persuade Stone to move his painting to the guest house. “Now I sell my work in galleries all over the world,” he says.

He also returned to modeling in June, walking for the first time in 33 years as the closing model for the Vetements men’s fashion show in Paris. “I really liked meeting the designer. [Guram Gvasalia] because he’s very talented and I think he’s very intelligent, and he’s doing something that to me is quite punk,” Stone says. “And you know, I was actually around punk, so I really like punk. “I really identify with punk.”

She also couldn’t help but think about her early days as a model in Europe. “When I was 19, I had a 38-year-old boyfriend who was a designer, a silk designer, and I knew all the designers because of him,” Stone recalls. “We traveled all over the world together. We dated on and off for 30 years. We are still best friends.”

Was marriage ever considered? “He would have married me, but I didn’t want to live in Europe,” explains Stone. “I knew I was going to be an actress. I knew what my destiny was. When I was little I really knew this was what was going to happen to me. It wasn’t just about acting. I knew I was going to be super famous and that I had a lot of things I needed to do. I just knew.”

In the last year, Stone’s time in front of the camera includes appearances in “Euphoria,” the action comedy “Nobody 2” and the independent comedy-drama “In Memoriam.”

Stone hopes to debut on Broadway in the future. He tells me that he tried to get the rights for a stage production of “All About Eve.” “She could be a good Margo Channing,” she says of the role of the elderly Broadway star created by Bette Davis in the 1950 film. “I mean, while I’m sleeping. Let’s go. Let’s go. When she says, ‘I hate men.'”

Stone says she was offered roles on Broadway, but nothing ever seemed right. He also revealed to me that he recently proposed an idea to his agent. “I thought, ‘Can we bring ‘Mame’ back and reset it in the punk era?” she says. “I could work in a department store in New York and have a biracial kid and be Mame in the punk era. The kid could have a mohawk. I would have bleached Blondie’s blonde hair. I could get Debbie Harry to do the music and Billy Idol.”

Another idea in the works is a gender-swapped adaptation of “La Cage Aux Folles,” the Tony-winning musical about a gay couple running a drag club who try to come back into the closet for just one night when one of the men’s sons bring his conservative future in-laws to dinner. “’La Cage’ with two lesbians,” says Stone. “I play the lipstick lesbian and you find a big butch lesbian who has to be feminine.”

But then he adds, laughing: “I tell people these ideas and they just look at me and say, ‘What the fuck are you taking?'”

But as we now know, Stone hardly drinks anything these days. In fact, he says, “this has been a period for me in this last year where I’ve really gotten my life back.”