Back in 2019, before a deadly global pandemic upended our way of life, I had the pleasure of profiling Maitland Ward. The former Boy Meets World actress had just become the hottest new face in porn—at the age of 42, no less—having been named the face of Deeper, a high-end XXX brand, and earning a pair of AVN nominations for her turn in the three-hour-long erotic epic Drive. And she’d only been at it for a handful of months.
“I found out that I love sexual performance,” Ward tells me. “It’s like being in a dance, or an ice-skating pair. You’re doing this great artistic piece, and I just love it.”
Ward is now one of the biggest stars in the adult industry, winning five AVN awards (the Oscars of porn) along with six XBIZ Awards (the Golden Globes of porn), toplining high-budget adult features, and pulling in six figures a month via OnlyFans. If all that weren’t enough, she’s about to make history by crossing back into mainstream Hollywood, starring in and co-producing The Big Time, a television sitcom centered on Ward’s adult film star and a geeky comic book writer teaming up on a porn superhero blockbuster.
Created by Zerelda and Mikey Rodriguez and co-starring Young Rock’s Brett Azar, The Big Time is a romantic-comedy show that Ward says will be aimed at streaming services due to its slightly risqué content. And she tells The Daily Beast it’s her hope that the series will open the door for other porn stars to cross over into Hollywood and erase its ridiculous stigma.
How have you been handling the pandemic? You wrote a fascinating piece for us about how guys are paying big money right now for online companionship during COVID.
OnlyFans has really taken off. My OnlyFans was quite strong beforehand, but I really noticed during the whole pandemic how the connection between the fans changed. People needed a more human connection and not just sexual content. People wanted to do customs that were situations—like pretending I was on a date with them or that we met in a bar. Things they couldn’t do in real life at the moment yet wanted to. And professional porn productions got up and running way faster than mainstream productions, because we already have a system of testing in place, in terms of STD testing, so the COVID testing and protocols weren’t as much of a shock to us as they were to other industries.
I heard you’re pulling in six figures a month on OnlyFans?
Yeah, I have! The consistency over time is the measuring factor of success with OnlyFans, and how you connect with the fans, and I have fantastic fans who are so connected. It’s fun! I get to shoot custom videos for them, do live shows, and it’s been such a lucrative thing. It’s a business I can control, and I feel very empowered like that. As we’ve discussed in the past, Hollywood wouldn’t let me do anything outside of a box, and now I have all these platforms where I can really express myself and have the business and brand that I envisioned. It’s divided between subscribers and customs—I have over 25,000 subs, but it can go up to 30,000 [paying $7.99 a month] and I have great tippers too.
I know we’ve talked a bit about this in the past, but there’s always been this odd church-and-state mentality when it comes to Hollywood and porn, and there have been precious few performers who’ve crossed over from one into the other. The biggest examples are probably Traci Lords and Sasha Grey, but almost purely because they caught the eye of an auteur like Steven Soderbergh or John Waters.
It’s unfortunate that there have been all these barriers over the years. What I thought was really cool about doing this pilot is when the writers came to me with this idea—a show about the porn industry in a sitcom form—I thought, “Oh god, will this be really disparaging to porn?” But when I read it, I was so blown away how it has such a fun, sex-positive vibe to it. It shows porn in a more fun light where we’re like this family—kind of like GLOW in a way. And they didn’t treat me like I was a porn actress. I always say, “I’m an actress in both—in mainstream and in porn, and I’m not separating things.” When I talk to people in the mainstream, I feel like the taboos are starting to shift, and I feel like I can cross back and forth, and people won’t just pigeonhole me as one or the other.
Can you tell me more about the sitcom—who you’ll be playing and what it’s about?
My character is a top porn performer who works for a studio that is failing. The old ways of shooting porn, they’re not making money off it anymore, and I have aspirations to make a feature film, so it’s touching on things in my life. I also love cosplay and it’s tied in that I do a lot of that. On the other end is this nerdy guy who’s a comic-book writer, and he doesn’t know a lot about sex and is very insulated. Somehow, his comic book lands on my lap, so to speak, and I’m like, “This is the film I want to make.” So, I contact him and get him into the studio and who’s so excited about potentially being the next big Marvel guy—and then he finds out he’ll be writing porn. It’s me helping him discover himself through his sexuality, and it also shows the porn family. They brought me on as a producer as well to help show what it’s really like to be on a porn set, and the more lighthearted aspects that they wouldn’t really think about. It has this Schitt’s Creek vibe where in the end, everyone is better for it. And our big project is this superhero porn movie. It’s this romantic comedy, but also a lighthearted look at the porn industry.
Whenever Hollywood tackles porn they always seem to employ the trope of “saving” a young woman from the adult industry—even in more progressive ones like The Girl Next Door.
Totally. Even talking to people who are pretty sex-positive about porn, they still have some very preconceived notions about the way things are—because they’re ingrained in our society and need to be rewritten. I think with a sitcom like this that just normalizes it, people will think, “Oh, I know situations like that in my work, and I want them to pull off this movie, and I want this nerdy guy to have sex.” A broader audience will be able to see how relative it really is.
And it’s being made by Leaving Normal Productions and will co-star Brett Azar of Young Rock.
Yes! They’re all so sex-positive and committed to making a really fun thing. It’s going to be cool filming this and working in the adult industry at the same time. I’ll be working on a project that’s commenting on the adult industry while working in it, so it will be fun to cross back and forth.
As far as the sexual content goes, is this sitcom more CBS or HBO Max?
It’s more streaming. We do have some degree of nudity involved and highly sexual topics that we’ll discuss—in a fun light, but I think it’ll be too much for CBS.
How do you think it’ll be to return to the sitcom format where you got your first big break in Boy Meets World?
I never really thought of myself as coming back to it, because I’d been so pigeonholed as being in sitcoms in the mainstream, but when we were doing the table reads, it was like stepping back into my old shoes. I realized how much I enjoy doing comedy, and to have a character that I had so much control over seemed like a perfect situation for me. It seems like no time has passed!
Maitland Ward and the cast of Boy Meets World
ABCAnd your entry into the adult industry was more about self-exploration, right? Exploring a side of yourself that you hadn’t in Hollywood?
Yes, absolutely. I started out doing sexier pictures on social media—Playboy-esque type photos—and then I became the No. 1 adult Patreon creator. To do it in the public like that, and to have people be along with me on this journey, every step of the way they were seeing me exploring new sides of myself and taking risks. I loved sexual performance and the exhibitionist quality of it. I wanted to be a serious, in-depth actress in pieces while also doing this great sexual performance and doing the scripts in porn has made me an actress again—and maybe people see me like that. It’s really strange that I had to cross over from mainstream to porn, say, “Look, take me seriously as an actress,” and it took going to porn for them to take me seriously as an actress.
There does seem to be more of a generational acceptance of porn among younger folks, and I think the internet has a lot to do with that. I’m 36 and was among the first generation of young people to have had internet porn. And now we’re adults. Before, porn was seen as this thing that was quite difficult to acquire, which I think made it feel more shameful.
Right. You had to find a VHS tape and hide it—or in the old days sneak off to a theater. I feel like people in their forties and older are a lot more shocked by things, and especially women in that age group, while younger women are far more accepting of it and into embracing their sexuality. So, maybe these walls will be torn down all the way.
Is your ultimate goal to straddle both industries—adult and Hollywood?
Yeah. I just want to create projects, whether in mainstream or porn, that are things that I want to work on and things that challenge me. I love to take risks and shock a little bit, so any opportunity like that I really love. But my main goal is to break down the walls between it where you can go back and forth without this “taboo” treatment by people. I want mainstream to be able to recognize the talents in porn, and for porn to be able to cross over into the mainstream. Let’s normalize sex and the adult industry. Normalization is the goal.
