"You're laughing, but I don't know if that's a nervous laugh, or an are-you-kidding-me-of-course-I-was laugh?"
Stone then promptly schooled Cowan thoroughly.
"Oh, I've been in this business for 40 years, Lee," she said.
"Can you imagine the business I stepped into 40 years ago? Looking like I look, from Nowhere, Pennsylvania? I didn't come here with any protection. I've seen it all."
More and more actresses in Hollywood are speaking out using the #MeToo movement, calling out the likes of alleged abusers like Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and Brett Ratner.
Stone also opened up about the brain aneurysm which almost killed her a decade ago.
"There was about a five per cent chance of me living," she said. "My whole life was wiped out."
She also spoke about being totally "alone" during her illness, saying "others aren't that interested in a broken person".
She said when she did work during that time colleagues must have thought she was a bit "peculiar".
"I didn't want to tell everybody what was happening because, you know, this is not a forgiving environment," she said.
Stone survived the medical crisis and now navigates her career while raising three sons as a single mother.
"I just was not the girl who was ever told that a man would define me. It was, that if I wanted to have a man in my life, it would be for partnership," she said.
"It wouldn't be an arrangement; it would be an actual relationship. And since those are pretty hard to come by."
Stone was most recently seen in award season favourite The Disaster Artist, where she plays dancer Iris Burton alongside James Franco, Seth Rogen and Alison Brie.
