Many adult performers begin their careers by, essentially, playing themselves. Porn viewers are of course familiar with the audition/casting couch genre, that rite of passage for entry-level porn star hopefuls. Those first-timer scenes are shot in “studios” that are little more than a hotel room or couch, 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 “What’s the wildest thing you’ve done sexually?”
The girl in question — in straight porn the male talents never go through this interrogation — answers in whatever 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 playing a part. She’s playing herself as someone just crossing the line between amateur and adult performer.
Jane Wilde, however, got something most of those girls never get: the rare chance to have a do-over. With Adult Time’s 2022 feature “Stars,” she got to play a much, much truer version of herself finding her way into the adult industry than any casting video interview could ever portray. For that performance, Wilde went on to receive the 2023 XBIZ Award for Best Acting — Lead.
Sure, the character was named “Julia,” but it was clear from the start that the film was an unprecedented adult industry biopic. With an unflinching script by Wilde and Bree Mills, the feature shows how Wilde turned the tables on an abusive situation, escaped a predator who controlled her early foray into camming right out of high school, and became a sex worker on her own terms. Wilde herself was so involved in the telling of the sometimes harrowing story 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 all kind of just came together like a trifecta.”
Wilde’s immersive performance as her younger self, cathartically reliving the most difficult moments of her not-so-distant past, was heralded as almost unprecedented and deserving of acclaim. Yet when it came to it, she still didn’t expect 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. Winning the award 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 a little out of body.”
Receiving top honors for her acting further glowed up Wilde’s already stellar profile entering the sixth year of an ever-expanding career. That same night, she was also spotlighted as a nominee for Best Acting — Supporting (for MissaX’s “One Last Kiss”), Best Sex Scene — Feature Movie (“Stars” and Wicked’s “Deranged”), Best Sex Scene — Gonzo, Best Sex Scene — All-Girl (twice), Best Sex Scene — Trans, Best Screenplay (“Stars”) and yes, for Female Performer of the Year, her third nod in four years of eligibility.
The self-induced emotional workout of creating “Stars” marked five years since Wilde joined the industry in 2017. Memorializing the turbulent period preceding her decision to become a professional adult performer at age 19 gave Wilde the opportunity to reassess her career.
All the intelligence and ambition displayed by the tiny, fiery cam girl from Queens who landed in California determined to out-slut the industry’s top names and become a legend in the process is still there. But having now proven herself many times over, including with the recent acting accolade, the Jane Wilde assessing her career going forward as she fearlessly samples escargot for the first time at Petit Trois — “I like it!” — 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, in 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 going to be.”
One way in which Wilde thought of her pre-pandemic life as 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 to take time off. This in turn led to a lot of introspection, which eventually led to “Stars” but also to other personal realizations.
“The forced time off allowed me to figure out who I am as a person,” Wilde reveals. “Because I didn’t know. So that’s been good. Some good came out of the bad.”
In hindsight, she says, she now feels that she “kind of just jumped into this industry.”
“I was getting out of a terrible situation and I didn’t know what else to do,” she recalls.
This led to a false belief that her only outlet for self expression was porn, an attitude attested to in interviews from 2018 until 2020, in which Wilde repeated as her mantra the 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 never to think about not being in adult, no matter what her age.
“The future was almost like a block, like a wall was put up,” she shares. “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 had become her identity, she says. Today she takes a broader perspective.
“It’s a very important part of my life — but not all I am,” she says. “Porn is not everything about me.”
Yet if porn was not the be-all and end-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.”
Wilde’s first major project post-pandemic was the groundbreaking “Stars,” in which she took ownership of abuse inflicted upon her by a manipulative older man when she was a teenager. It brought her face to face with a certain underlying uneasiness she had always been vaguely aware of feeling.
“Any scene that I’ve done with a man where there’s like, a mean vibe to it — I wouldn’t necessarily call it triggered, but I would say that there’s definitely an aura of uncomfortableness around doing stuff like that,” she explains. “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.”
“When I was younger — like 19 and 20, even 21 — I couldn’t really recognize that,” she continues. “I think I kind of would just tell myself, ‘It’s just acting, 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,” she emphasizes. “I never had. I pushed it down.”
One of the unusual and controversial aspects of “Stars” is that its explicit sex scenes — which in porn are obviously designed to arouse — are bracketed by disturbing depictions of Wilde’s real-life abuse.
The performer-writer-director was very familiar with the complexities of taboo subgenres, having starred in several scenarios for prestige labels such as Adult Time’s Pure Taboo. Those experiences gave her insights about thorny topics, and she notes that taboo content has become “a very normalized thing.”
“At the end of the day, the goal of every industry, not just porn, is to make money,” she begins. “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 stepsiblings 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 going to be a disconnect there.
“I think that informed consent is the most important thing in this industry,” Wilde continues. “I don’t just mean, ‘Oh, what are my boundaries for this sex scene?’ Before I agree to the scene, we’re basically making a verbal contract — and if you sign a contract 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 and so on, that’s not informed consent.”
Wilde says she has been fortunate in 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 information until the day before a shoot.
“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. I want to be able to put my wardrobe and my stuff together two days before, 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,” she explains. “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 companies that go out of their way to ensure a positive 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. And 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 her “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 featuring her writing and one of her recent passions, film photography.
“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 Wilde.
“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 insists. “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 longevity in porn was the single most important thing in her life.
“Seeing how somebody like Adriana or Riley kept upping the ante and kept doing more and more, and people just couldn’t get enough of them, I definitely envisioned myself like that,” she remembers. “But there’s a lot of things that I didn’t realize about living that kind of lifestyle and just wanting to just push yourself 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’ve figured out what they are. Physical and mental both, they go hand in hand.”
Her body, she concludes, is a temple, and she doesn’t want to do anything to cause herself unnecessary pain.
“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 me always feeling like I needed to measure up to something or someone.”
Jane Wilde, recovering 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.
