The expression “keeping it real” may be overused to the point of cliche, but it is the ideal way to describe 2023 XBIZ Girl/Girl Performer of the Year Aiden Ashley’s approach to on-camera sex. Ask anyone in the industry, be it fellow performers, directors, agents or fans, and you’ll get the selfsame answer: Girl can fuck.
Ashley herself is perfectly aware of this.
“When people watch my scenes, they can tell the difference,” she tells XBIZ during an interview at her secluded, cozy home. “I know that may sound egotistical or arrogant, but it’s a different way to perform. My scenes are more real — even my scene partners and the directors say it. People see the realness because, honestly, I never watched porn before getting into porn.”
Her secret is pretty straightforward, and she doesn’t mind sharing it.
“I have sex the way I want to have sex,” Ashley reveals. “I don’t want other people’s porn to influence me, or feel the pressure of like, ‘Oh, I should do that, that looks hot.’ I like to feel like I want to, and I do what feels good to me. And it’s really worked for me.”
That’s a bit of an understatement. Ashley has been hailed as a reliable performer for more than a decade now. Earlier in her career she focused only on all-girl work, but she has since expanded into the boy/girl world, especially for acting roles.
That’s the other hallmark of Ashley’s career: her unmistakable ambition to climb to the highest rungs of adult acting performance. The determination and focus in her manner is noticeable even in casual conversation: Aiden Ashley means business. The cozy domesticity where our interview takes place is a necessary counterbalance to that work ethic.
Ashley embodies the old Hollywood trope of the actress who will turn down no challenge and learn just about anything to land a coveted part. She spoke to XBIZ during a brief break while getting ready to fly to Florida to star in Stormy Daniels’ “Lawless,” a feature that involves an unusually lengthy 60 pages of dialogue — which Ashley was entrusted to learn almost overnight. Plus, Daniels is a famous horse-lover and “Lawless” involves a horse farm. Can Ashley ride horses?
She smirks, “I’ll figure it out.” And nobody doubts she will. Yet that down-to-Earth vibe remains her signature.
“I am a real person,” she emphasizes. “People always think porn stars are a crazy facade. Me, I go to work and I come home. And I feel like one of the reasons I’ve had such longevity in this industry is because I separate my work and my personal life. We are real people and have real feelings and do real things. And sometimes Twitter and social media gets very, very harsh on us.”
Ashley thinks it is good for fans to remember that performers are human beings.
“Sure,” she adds, “we all have personas. But at the end of the day, we go home and we have feelings.”
Those feelings come into play in her notably authentic sex performances, be it as herself in gonzo or as a character in scripted scenes.
“I just stay super real,” she reiterates. “And that’s also kind of my downfall sometimes: I just keep very, very true and very real, even if it’s not what the trend is at the time. I think it helps in that it’s given me longevity, and it hurts in that I didn’t skyrocket to the top at first.”
That “first” was when she was 18, working in the music industry in Los Angeles after gaining some experience stripping, back in Arizona. Ashley got into the industry almost on a dare from music friends. Her first scene was a girl/girl scene for Penthouse, with prominent Penthouse Pet Celeste Star, who gave her tips and took the novice under her wing in the makeup room.
“She was amazing,” Ashley reminisces. “At the time, I liked girls more than guys. I was seeing girls, I was hanging out with girls. I didn’t like men, and also it wasn’t like a goal of mine to be in the porn industry. I was just like, ‘I’ll do this for some money so I can do music.’ So I told my agent that I would only do girl/girl. Literally it was like a 48-hour turnaround from the moment I said, ‘I’m going to be a porn star’ to the day I was on set for Penthouse.”
Ashley shares that at the time, she had never even sent a nude to anyone, much less filmed herself having sex.
Down the line, this would also feed into her ever-growing popularity on OnlyFans, a platform whose customers prize authenticity and “real sex” over everything else.
“I think that’s also one of the reasons why I’ve always been so real in my scenes,” she confesses. “The first time I ever saw a porn movie was when I was filming one. The first time I ever was nude on camera was for that scene. And honestly, to this day, I have never in my entire life watched an entire porn scene from start to finish.”
She corrects herself when the interviewer reminds her of the infamous “Maid to Kill” screening last year in a Westwood movie theater.
“Oh God,” she laughs.
Picture this: producer, writer and director Harry Sparks’ Sparks Entertainment rented out the posh, historic Landmark theater near UCLA to screen the ambitious sci-fi porn thriller co-starring Ashley, Lily Larimar, Anna Claire Clouds, Ana Foxxx, Isiah Maxwell and Kira Noir. The stars, creative team, press, agents, other industry figures and mainstream friends were invited.
What nobody expected was that the version screened on the theater-quality screen was the full porn version, as opposed to the “soft cut” usually screened at such events.
“That’s what nightmares are literally made out of,” Ashley laughs, cringing in hindsight. “That’s actually a famous nightmare: being in a theater full of your friends, and they’re all watching you having sex on the screen.
“I’m sitting there and I invited friends to come with me, mainstream friends, who totally thought they were going to just be there watching me act. And then all of a sudden, Isaiah Maxwell comes up on this screen — and there’s his dick! His dick on the movie screen is way more enormous and…” She cracks up, unable to continue. “Oh. My. God.”
So much for watching her own porn, especially given the now award-winning realism of her fucking. Her extended “Maid to Kill” threesome with Clouds and Larimar is a prime example of what has earned her recognition for her girl/girl oeuvre.
“That was hot,” she admits with an impish smile. “I feel like everyone got a boner in the theater during that one. I don’t know how not to have real sex. I don’t worry about camera angles, to be honest. All my scenes are beautiful, yes, but some of them, they’re not as perfectly posed or attractive as other people’s scenes. I mean, I worry about opening up for the camera and seeing the camera and stuff, but I don’t have to be perfectly posed to eat pussy. I know what I’m doing and people are into it.
“I feel like sometimes the emotion that comes across on our bodies and our faces is more important than being completely perfectly open and posed for the camera.”
Although girl/girl was her first love, and has now led to her first award, Ashley continues accumulating acting gigs on the road to achieving her next benchmarks: winning an equally coveted acting award and directing her own projects.
“After being girl/girl for a while,” she explains, “I did a couple special projects involving boy/girl for people I trusted, like Axel Braun and Joanna Angel, who is one of my good friends.”
Before she signed with Motley, her current agency, she had only done about seven boy/girl scenes.
“With Motley, I started doing a bunch of boy/girl and I do like it, but honestly I like doing girl/girl way more. I love being like an all-girl performer. That’s where my roots are. This past month — it has not been intentional at all because like I’m still open for boy/girl — but every single one of my shoots has been girl/girl. I don’t hate it,” she laughs.
Ashley has yet to do anal or a gangbang, or a multiple penetration shoot. “I’ve done an orgy scene for Bellesa,” she says. “It was my orgy, they let me pick everyone. It was really fun! I love shooting for Bellesa, absolutely love them. They’re one of my favorite companies to shoot for because they showcase real sex. We get along really well: they like my style and they like my vibe.”
Her first-ever boy/girl scene was as Catwoman for Axel Braun’s “Batman XXX,” alongside Giovanno Francesco.
“I had black hair!” she declares, pulling out photos of her take on Batman’s “meowst” alluring nemesis. “That was for more than the entire first half of my career. That’s also why sometimes I feel that no one knows me — everyone thinks blonde-hair Aiden and black-hair Aiden are two different people!”
Braun had already given Ashley her first big acting role, in “Star Wars XXX.”
“I was one of the aliens in the cantina doing a girl/girl with Kimberly Kane,” she explains. “But none of the girls could hold a gun right, so on-set Axel also made me be a bunch of storm troopers. They were just me green-screened multiple times because I had a mask over my face anyway. So then I played basically every single storm trooper in it that didn’t have a sex scene because I could hold the gun correctly.”
That is just a minor example of Ashley doing whatever it takes to excel on camera.
“I take everything so seriously. I can get really upset and disappointed and frustrated when people show up to set and there’s a huge script like this” — she points at the thick “Lawless” package — and they don’t have the lines learned. I spent all this time at home, learning my lines and going over things, and it’s so frustrating when people show up who don’t care.”
Everything she has done in adult, she says, has been done with purpose.
“Even though it’s kind of an accident for me to fall into this industry, I really care about my work. I hope a mainstream director sees my acting and has a project for me, something crazy cool.”
Horror, she notes, would be a perfect genre for her, as a lifelong fan of scary movies. In 2021, she partnered up with fellow genre maniac Ricky Greenwood as the lead in his werewolf movie “Blue Moon Rising,” which involved hours and hours of makeup and prosthetics to turn her into a feature creature.
“I really put my whole heart and soul into all of my roles, whether it be a werewolf or a sweet girl,” she says. “Ricky’s shoot was insane. I slept with back hair on. That was so gross, but I loved it! Everyone cared so much. There’s so much attention to detail. There were definitely challenges, like how to shoot in the middle of the woods in February when it’s freezing, and we had to get generators out there, and stage the woods and make sure everything was good to go.”
She now counts “Blue Moon Rising” among her all-time favorite projects, alongside Greenwood’s “A Killer on the Loose.”
“I like horror movies and thrillers, and I like drama,” she says. “I definitely feel I’m better at those genres than I am with comedy. Oh, and I’m really good at romance stuff, serious romance. I feel like that’s where I shine.”
Stormy Daniels’ upcoming “Lawless” is shaping up as one of those serious romances.
“I’m getting ready to ship out for five days to go shoot all these dialogue scenes in Florida,” Ashley says, explaining why she has to wrap up the interview.
“It’s really cool working with Stormy again,” she adds. “She selected me for this and we go way back. She used to book me for girl/girl shoots when I was first in the industry, and she really liked how I performed and booked me for quite a few of her Stormy movies when I was like 18 or 19. So, when she came back to directing, I was one of her first thoughts about people to call, and she heard that my acting chops got a lot more refined since I was younger and that I was doing boy/girl. So she contacted me and asked me if I wanted to be the lead of her comeback project, ‘Hysteria.’ And now we’re doing ‘Lawless.’”
And what’s next, after learning horsemanship?
“Someone just actually wrote a feature around me and they’re going to film a big circus feature, where I’m doing high flying trapeze!”
Does Aiden Ashley know how to trapeze?
“I’ll just figure it out.”
