Social Media Cruelty Inspired ‘Nobody 2’ Villain

Bob Odenkirk sent Sharon Stone a note asking her to be in “Nobody 2” after they met for the first time at the Golden Globes.

“She was kind to me, said hi to me and I thought, ‘Holy cow, Sharon Stone!’” Odenkirk told me Monday at the “Nobody 2” premiere at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. “Then we had this big bad villain and part of the fun of this to me is I want a regular guy to be ending up in a James Bond film. Starts in the real world, ends up in a film. And we needed a big villain, a big presence, a big personality. I wondered if Sharon would be willing to be that and she said yes… She owns the third act entirely.”

The sequel to 2021’s “Nobody” finds Odenkirk’s assassin character Hutch Mansell facing off against Stone as evil bootlegger Lendina. The two unexpectedly cross paths when Hutch takes his family on vacation to a waterpark.

Stone says her work as Lendina was inspired by taking a good look at today’s world. “I’m a mother of three, and when you go through this kind of climate and through COVID and through this onslaught of what has happened with social media with three boys who’ve become young men, there’s a lot of pent-up feelings about a lot of things that I put on the screen,” she told me. “I’m not really happy with what comes out of social media, and I wanted to portray that cruelty, the lack of any sort of care or sense of responsibility. There’s no empathy, and this is becoming a climate that people are starting to think is correct because it’s something they saw in a video game. So I based the character on that because I’ve had it with that, really had it with that, and so I wanted to demonstrate it because I felt it was the zeitgeist of the moment now.”

She continued, “That’s very important to me when I’m going to step up and play somebody who’s killing a bunch of people, because even when my kids were little and they played toy soldiers, I made them have a MASH unit because I’m like, ‘You’re killing them’ … I wanted my children to have an ethical reality because you can take the toy guns away, but they’ll make a gun out of a sandwich and chase you around the house, so you have to create a sense of ethical understanding. I play villains and so when I play them I want them to attach to something in the zeitgeist that people are gonna leave the theater going, ‘Man, that was great, but wow.’”

The Oscar-nominated Stone said that she “liked getting the calls” that “she might have gone a little too far.”

“Really? Look around. Really?” she continued. “What do you think is too far? I think you should wakey-wakey, eggs and bakey.”

Meanwhile, Stone also revealed that she’ll start shooting “Euphoria” Season 3 in a couple of weeks. “I’m a big fan of all of the kids that are on that show, past and present, and I feel they’ve hit something that’s really, really important,” she said of Sam Levinson’s HBO series. “It’s something that we do need to see and understand and I’m grateful to be a part of it.”

Stone said she wasn’t allowed to talk about who she’s playing on the show. She joins the series alongside new cast members Rosalía, Marshawn Lynch, Kadeem Hardison, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Toby Wallace, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Priscilla Delgado, James Landry Hébert and Anna Van Patten. Returning stars include Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, Hunter Schafer, Jacob Elordi, Eric Dane, Alexa Demie, Maude Apatow, Martha Kelly, Chloe Cherry, Colman Domingo and Dominic Fike.