Many adult performers begin their career playing a character that is a version of themselves. After all, porn viewers are often familiar with the “audition/casting couch” genre, that rite-of-passage for a lot of entry-level porn star hopefuls involving “first-timer” studios that are little more than a couch or a hotel room, a camera and a ring light, and an inquisitive POV male talent asking a barrage of perhaps-too-intimate questions like “When did you lose your virginity?” and “How did you decide to do porn?” or “What’s the wildest thing you’ve done sexually?” etc.
The girl in question — in straight porn the male talents never go through this interrogation — answers the way she thinks may lead to further gigs, sometimes teasingly, other times awkwardly and very occasionally like a natural pro. However she handles the potentially cringe situation, though, she’s merely playing a part — the part of herself as someone who’s just crossing the mythical line between amateur and someone who does porn.
In Jane Wilde’s case, with Adult Time’s 2022 feature “Stars,” she got the rare chance to have a do-over. She got to play a much, much truer version of herself finding her way into the adult industry than in any casting video interview, and went on to receive the 2023 XBIZ award for Best Acting – Lead for her portrayal.
Sure, the character may have been renamed Julia, but nobody was ever not aware that the film was an unprecedented industry biopic, from an unflinching script by Wilde and Bree Mills showing how she turned the tables on an abusive situation to become a sex worker on her own terms.
Wilde was so involved in the telling of the sometimes harrowing story of how she escaped a predator who controlled her early foray into camming right out of high school, that she ended up receiving a co-directing credit with Mills.
“I didn’t go into the project with the directing title,” Wilde tells XBIZ at a booth at the Valley’s best French restaurant, Petit Trois. “The co-directing credit was given to me after the fact because the act of directing came very naturally in the case of ‘Stars.’ Because it was my story — I was the star, I wrote it. It’s like it all kind of just came together like a trifecta.”
A Serious Exercise in Self-Immersion
Wilde’s performance as her younger self, a serious exercise in self-immersion and cathartic reliving of some of the most difficult moments of her not-that-distant past, was heralded as almost unprecedented and deserving of the top acting accolade.
“I was shocked,” Wilde says. “I didn’t expect to win it. I mean, I don’t know what I expected. I’ve learned to keep my expectations low so I don’t get disappointed. I did not go into that evening thinking that I was going to leave with that award, if any. But I’m so grateful. It was one of the best moments of my life. I was sitting at the table with all my friends, and when my name got called, everyone started cheering so loud. And it was like, ‘Oh, I get to go on the stage and make a speech.’ It felt like an out of body experience.”
The recognition for her acting only rounded up Wilde’s stellar profile entering the sixth year of an ever-expanding career. That same night, she was also nominated for Best Supporting acting (for MissaX’s “One Last Kiss”), for Best Sex Scene — Feature Movie (for “Stars” and Wicked’s “Deranged”), for Best Sex Scene — Gonzo, for Best Sex Scene — All-Girl (twice), for Best Sex Scene — Trans, for Best Screenplay (for “Stars”) and, yes, for Female Performer of the Year (her third nod in four years of eligibility).
The self-induced emotional workout that was “Stars” — marking five years since her joining the industry at 19 in 2017 by memorializing the turbulent period preceding her decision to become a professional adult performer — gave Wilde the opportunity to reassess her career.
Sure, the intelligence and ambition that she displayed pretty much from the beginning — when the tiny, fiery former cam girl from Queens landed in California determined to out-slut the industry’s top supersluts and become legendary in the process — are still there. But having proven herself many times over, including with the recent acting accolade, the Wilde fearlessly trying escargot for the first time at Petit Trois (“I like it!”) and assessing her career moving forward is decidedly more reflective.
Last time Wilde gave us a lengthy interview, which she herself scheduled and arranged, with typical pluck, it was early 2020 and she had single-handedly self-produced her own showcase, the acclaimed “Jane Wilde is Agape,” released by Evil Angel.
“It’s crazy that when we were discussing that, it was not even the pandemic, it was right before,” Wilde reminisces. “So crazy. It’s really like a before and after. It’s not even comparable.”
What changed in those three years?
“What hasn’t changed is a more accurate question,” she laughs. “I’m almost 25 now. In general, that is just a huge change, and my personality, maturity, everything. But having to live through a pandemic, and having to accept that I can’t plan everything that happens in my life down to the day or the month that I’m going to do it, I learned that that’s not how the world works. And I always thought that that’s how my life was gonna be.”
One of the crucial ways in which Wilde thought her pre-pandemic life was endlessly sustainable was her career.
“I always thought that I was going to be in porn forever,” she admits. “I would not allow myself to think of an alternative or a future without it. I guess I was kind of codependent with this industry before the pandemic and not in a healthy way.”
The slowing down of life during most of 2020 forced the work-driven dynamo that is Jane Wilde to take time off. This in turn led to a lot of introspection, which eventually led to “Stars” but also to more personal realizations.
“The forced time off allowed me to figure out who I am as a person,” she reveals. “Because I didn’t know. So that’s been good. Some good came out of the bad.”
Life Beyond ‘Ultimate Slut’ Status
In hindsight, Wilde says she now feels she “kind of just jumped into this industry when I was 19, because I was getting out of a terrible situation and I didn’t know what else to do. And now I feel like I can finally take time to figure myself out.”
This led to a false belief that her only outlet for self expression was porn and nothing but porn, which is attested to in interviews from 2018 until 2020 and Wilde repeated as a mantra a single-minded desire to be “a true slut” and to out-gangbang role models like Adriana Chechik and Riley Reid.
“I look at their gangbangs and think that I can’t do that yet,” she told an interviewer in 2019. “I don’t feel that I can get to that level yet and exert that amount of energy but I will get there in time, I just need to practice and hype myself up.”
Wilde now realizes that she had conditioned herself to “not allow my brain to even conceive of an idea of me not being in this industry — whether I was 30, 35 or 40 years old.”
For her, the future was almost like a block, like a wall was put up.
“I wasn’t thinking about my future because I was scared to ever think about a time when I would not be actively in this industry, because then I was like, ‘Well, who am I?’ And that would force me to think about it and figure out who I am, when I didn’t know.”
Porn, turns out, had become her identity, she says, instead of “a very important part of my life — but not all I am. Porn is not everything about me.”
If porn was not the “end all, be all,” she asked herself, what was?
“So, that’s kind of been interesting to figure out,” she smiles. “I don’t have any intentions or plans to quit or leave at this time, but I know that there is going to be a time in the future when I want to pursue other things, or I don’t want to work anymore, or I want to have a family. And I’ve started to accept that. That’s okay. Now I know that it doesn’t mean that I’m quitting or a failure if I ever want to do other things with my life, basically.”
Wilde’s first major project post-pandemic was the groundbreaking “Stars,” where she took ownership of abuse that was done to her by a manipulative older man when she was a teenager. and she did it on her own terms.
Even before, while doing certain scenes, she had noticed a certain uneasiness in some of the dynamics. “I guess, any scene that I’ve done with a man, where there’s like, a mean vibe to it — I wouldn’t necessarily call it like triggered, but I would say that, you know, there’s definitely an aura of like, uncomfortableness around doing stuff like that. During those taboo-type scenes where there’s an element of a power exchange, a power dynamic, and the older male usually, is the one in power, and is kind of treating the female like the subordinate or disrespectfully, that definitely would make me feel a negative type of way,” she explains.
“When I was younger — like 19, and 20 even 21 — I couldn’t really recognize that,” she continues. “And I think I kind of would just tell myself, like, ‘it’s just acting, it’s, it’s just for fun.’ But is it really for fun if you’re not having fun? Doing ‘Stars’ on my own terms was one of the most important things I’ve done not just in this industry, but in my whole life. And that kind of started a whole healing journey that I’ve been on for almost a year.”
Wilde says she is “grateful for the experience, not just because it was so cool to make a film like that and get to star in it, but just to deal with that, for the first time in my life deal with that experience. I never had. I pushed it down.”
One of the controversial aspects of watching “Stars,” was its combination of explicit sex scenes — which obviously in porn are designed to arouse — bracketed among disturbing depictions of Wilde’s real-life abuse.
The performer-writer-director was very familiar with the complexities of the taboo subgenres, having starred in several scenarios for prestige labels such as Adult Time’s Pure Taboo. Those experiences made her have very insightful, illuminating opinions about a sometimes thorny topic.
Taboo content, she begins, “has become a very normalized thing. At the end of the day, the goal of every industry, not just porn, is to make money. That’s like the equivalent of success — making money. So at some point, I don’t know when, I don’t even think I was around when this happened, but somebody on some website, some tech person probably, discovered that that type of thing trends really well and makes people want to click on the scene and buy it and pay money. Those people, when they see fauxcest or step siblings or mom and dad stuff equals money, they may not be thinking about an individual person’s trauma. That’s not a negative thing on porn — industries are run by people that are not actually on the set doing what we do, and often there’s gonna be a disconnect there.
“The older I get, the more interesting I think it is,” Wilde continues. “I think that informed consent is the most important thing in this industry. I don’t just mean, ‘Oh, what are my boundaries for this sex scene.’ Before I agree to the scene — and we’re basically making a verbal contract — if you’re signing a contract, basically, without knowing who you’re working with, how long you’re going to be on set, what type of stuff you need to provide from your own wardrobe or your own personal items, etc., that’s not informed consent.”
A Personal and Professional Journey
Wilde admits she has been fortunate that most of the companies that she has worked for have been very professional, as have most people on her sets. Still she wishes the industry would not normalize things like not sending the shoot information until the day before.
“I know that when I’m going to set I want to be as prepared as possible,” she adds. “And mental preparation is a big part of that. If I want to put my wardrobe and my stuff back together two days before, I think I should be able to do that, so I don’t have to worry about it the day of or the night before.”
Wilde notes that for adult performers, those matters are “more sensitive than just showing up and modeling for eight hours and just posing without taking your clothes off. Doing a sex scene is much more intimate and strenuous on your body. It has the potential to cause more trauma — or it has also the potential to be a great experience with informed consent. Why can’t we strive to have a good experience for everyone involved.”
Wilde says she loves working with certain companies which really do their best to make sure it is a good experience, like Adult Time.
“I’ve worked with them for five years since I started,” she says. “And they’ve only gotten better — their standards are always getting higher. Every time I work with them. It’s just such a good experience. I know that if I need anything, I don’t need to be afraid that I’m going to be judged for asking for something.
As for the “super-slut” dreams of yore, Wilde has also put those in perspective. Nowadays, she is more likely to enthuse about her plans to put out a self-produced art zine with her writing and one of her recent passions, film photography.
“Like, I’m a hippie,” she says without affectation. “I just want to love people and express love and receive love.”
Still, she appreciates and is very kind to “super slut”-era Jane.
“I’m grateful for doing all of that, because that was a part of my journey, and discovering and figuring out who I am and what I want to do,” she adds. “I always wanted to be very legendary in this industry. And I believe that doing that extreme stuff definitely helped me achieve the goals that I wanted to reach. I got the awards. I got the recognition. I got the status with the fans.”
During her first three years, Wilde says she thought that her longevity in porn was the single most important thing in life.
“Seeing how somebody like Adriana or Riley kept upping the ante and kept doing more and more and, and people just couldn’t get enough of them,” she notes, “I definitely envisioned myself like that.”
But she adds that there are a lot of things that she did not realize about living that kind of lifestyle and just wanting to push herself harder and harder.
“You know, I’m not a superhero,” she reflects. “My body has done so much for me in this life, and I guess it’s a gift to be able to do certain things more easily than others. But I do have limits. And I have definitely reached them, not now, but just in general, I’ve reached them and I figured out what they are. Physical and mental both, they go hand in hand.”
Her body, she concludes, is like a temple.
“I don’t want to do anything that’s going to cause me pain when I don’t have to. I never would have thought that I would feel that way three years ago,” she laughs. “I would have been like, ‘suck it up’ because that’s what everybody around me was telling me, and I was always feeling like I needed to measure up to something or someone.”
Jane Wilde, recovering industry workaholic, says she is now finally “starting to be more okay with just going with the flow and just seeing what happens.”
And that might be the ultimate star move.