Maitland Ward From Boy Meets World Tells The Story Of How She Got Into Porn After Being Nominated For Multiple 2020 AVN Awards
Source - Porn pays better than Disney, a former actress-turned-porn star says. Maitland Ward, who rose to fame on ABC/Disney Channel’s “Boy Meets World,” says she makes more money in the adult entertainment industry and has even been nominated for awards — take that, Academy!
The actress, 42, tells The Daily Beast she recently was nominated for two AVN Awards, a ceremony akin to the Academy Awards but for porn, for Best Three-Way Sex Scene and Best Supporting Actress.
“When people say, ‘she had to turn to porn,’ I laugh, because this is a good thing and I’m making more now,” she says. “If you talked to my younger, more virginal soap-opera self, I never would have seen this coming out of me.”
First of all, congrats to Maitland on the nominations. I’m a little confused by her name, ‘Maitland’, but that’s neither here nor there. She had a successful career change late in life and that’s no easy feat, so hopefully she’s able to take the awards home to make it all worth it. As far as how some gets into porn, that’s always been something that’s interested me. A lot of people have a tape leaked, get an insultingly low offer from a company like CamSoda, then never follow up. Maitland’s story is much more unique than that.
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From The Daily Beast:
Ward, who played Rachel McGuire, the bombshell redhead obsession of both Eric (Will Friedle) and Jack (Matthew Lawrence), says her career transition to porn happened by chance. After “Boy Meets World” ended in 2000, she booked a few bit parts in Hollywood before moving on to study theater and screenwriting in New York and Los Angeles.
But in 2013, as a thirty-something actress, she says she got her big break at comic conventions while dressed up in sexy cosplay, which she posted on social media — much to her team’s chagrin.
“I had a publicist who was like, ‘Stop putting up sexy pictures. They will not hire you for anything if you do that. Once you get past 30, 35, they don’t hire you for doing sexy stuff. You should be auditioning to play Disney moms,’” she says. “He thought he was giving me good advice but it just wasn’t my thing. I was typecast. I was seen as a wholesome comedy star, and I was trying to fight against that. I didn’t want to play a Disney mom.”
Soon after, she discovered that her millions of Instagram fans wanted more, so she began selling adult content — including nude photos — online through a Snapchat premium account, porn app OnlyFans and content service Patreon.
“For 2018, I was the No. 1 adult-content creator for Patreon,” she says, “and it put the power back in my hands. Studios wouldn’t give me that.”
Cosplay to Patreon to Snapchat premium to OnlyFans to porn. Seems like a natural progression. It also seems like she did it almost to spite her team after they kept trying to cast her in rolls she didn’t want. Which is great. The best part of the whole thing is how much money she was/is making…
Ward tells The Daily Beast she makes as much as five-figures a month on OnlyFans alone, snagging $62,000 in her best month during 2018.
$62k a month. I’d do a lot more for a lot less. From there she started filming actual scenes.
Soon after, she started doing girl-on-girl sex scenes on her premium Snapchat account, something she calls “just another kind of performance,” which led to her first feature porn role in “Drive.” She first announced her role in the three-and-a-half-hour “erotic thriller” on Instagram, where she posts a slew of X-rated photos.
Ward describes filming porn scenes as something that “feels natural.” Now that she’s the face of high-end XXX brand Deeper.com, she has no plans to slow down any time soon, and has several other porn projects in the works.
“It’s insane! At my age, to come in and become a porn star?” she says. “I don’t have a label either. I’m just this grown woman who loves sex. One thing I really like is to surprise people, to shock them and to get them stirred up. I’m going to keep doing that.”
But aside from the money, she’s glad to still have her “Boy Meets World” fans. “They say, I’ve been masturbating to you all these years,” she says, “And you know, that’s a feat that I will be proud of.”
And that’s that. If you want to get into porn just start dressing up like a cartoon and things will work themselves out. The AVN’s are January 25th in Vegas. Best of luck to Maitland and all the other performers.