LOS ANGELES—Anya Olsen juggled bartending with selling real estate before taking a chance with porn.
“So I was working a bunch and I wasn’t making the money I really wanted to and I had always been very sexual,” Olsen recalls. “And I had always thought about it, honestly from a young age.”
Olsen mixed cocktails at a bar in Boston that was frequented by veteran performer Ashley Fires and her husband.
“And I got to know them,” Olsen says. “We live like 10 minutes away from each other. She introduced herself and told me what they did. I started shooting with them in New Hampshire and then a week later Jack, her husband’s brother, was a recruiter and he had me flying out to L.A.”
That was almost a year-and-a-half ago. Now 40-something movies later, the 22-year-old is among the top rising stars in adult entertainment, receiving a nomination for Best New Starlet for the 2017 AVN Awards on Jan. 21 in Las Vegas.
Not long after shooting with Fires, Olsen performed for ATK and then for FTV Girls in Arizona, where she realized she may be ready for a porn career.
“It’s all very public nudity and masturbation. I just remember we went to this golf course. It was on a Sunday so there was a shit-ton of people and there was this group of like 10 guys golfing,” Olsen says.
“[The director] was like, ‘get naked and run out to that group of guys.’ And I was like, ‘wait what, is this real? Are you fucking with me? You really want me to get naked here, right now in front of everyone?’ He’s like yep. I was like, ‘oh my god is this how porn is? What am I getting myself into?’
“But I’m glad that was my second shoot. After that I was like I can do anything. I like the public stuff now, too. When I masturbate I’ll leave the blinds open or the curtains because I know my neighbors will walk past.”
Indeed, Olsen brought a sense of adventure into the business that has led to a new understanding about what turns her on.
“I’m definitely willing to try everything once because you never know what you’ll like,” Olsen tells AVN, noting she didn’t really commit to porn full time until this past February.
“I didn’t know I would like anal or rough sex but now I love it. That’s what I prefer. This industry has taught me a lot about myself.”
Olsen has already performed several on-camera firsts, namely her virgin anal and double-penetration scenes for Greg Lansky’s AVN Award-winning Tushy imprint. Even though she had done anal in her personal life she admitted to being worried about trying it on camera last December.
“There’s so much that could go wrong. It’s on camera and there’s all these people, so I was nervous about that,” Olsen confesses.
But not unlike anything else she’s done thus far, Olsen went for it.
“And the orgasms are like no others—nothing compared to a vaginal orgasm,” Olsen says. “Afterward I’m like, don’t touch me, don’t look at me, don’t speak, bye! And it happens so quickly—within maybe a minute of that I’ll cum.”
That first anal scene with Markus Dupree went so well that Lansky invited her back to shoot for his sister site Blacked and signed her to an exclusive, one-year contract for anal and interracial. She did her first D.P. for Tushy and in September threw down for her first IR anal for Blacked. In January, she’ll be signing at Lansky’s Blacked/Tushy/Vixen booth at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino.
For Lansky, the reigning AVN Director of the Year whose companies accounted for 16 AVN Awards in 2016, Olsen is a pleasure to shoot.
"I am thrilled to have Anya on our roster of amazing exclusive models on Blacked and Tushy,” Lansky tells AVN. “In just a short amount of time her incredible talent has made her one of the most popular models with our large fan base. Anya is committed, genuine, and delivers incredible performances. Her style and beauty is in total resonance with our brands."
Olsen’s credits for Lansky include My First Interracial 7 (Blacked), Young and Beautiful (Tushy) First Anal 2 (Tushy) and Girlfriend Experience 2 (Vixen).
“I love working for Greg because he’s just amazing. I would only work for him if I could. His stuff is just so tasteful and it just comes out so beautifully. It’s classy porn,” Olsen says.
“It’s very different from…not a lot of people shoot it. Nubiles, they shoot very nice stuff as well. I feel like no one compares to Greg. He’s great. It’s like a movie, it’s like not even porn. I would just watch it to watch it, not even masturbate to it.”
Olsen, who is represented by East Coast Talent, also cites Nubiles as another favorite “I think because it’s so close to Greg’s style. It’s all very natural, very pretty.”
But the excitable brunette can go from “pretty” sex to gritty hardcore on a moment’s notice. It’s why she welcomed her tussle with The Hookup Hotshot Bryan Gozzling for Evil Angel. Gozzling’s aggressive style tapped into something exciting and new for Olsen, who embraced the challenge when she met him for Extreme Dating.
“I really like the way it came out. It’s just very raw to the point where all our makeup’s off like what you see is what you get. He fucks us,” Olsen says. “I really liked that scene in particular because it really pushed me to my limits. I never really dabbled in rough sex.
“It was my first experience with rough sex, honestly. I loved it. I loved the sloppiness and they make it look so much more rough than what it was. My mom, she was so upset. She was like, ‘you looked like you were in pain!’ And I was like, ‘no mom, really it’s great, pushing you to your limit. I love it.’”
Olsen says Gozzling has a certain way with women.
“It’s weird. I remember him saying—he had his fingers in my pussy—and he said something like he how he could read my vagina. He would feel around. I don’t know. He has this weird, daddy kind of vibe. He takes control of it. I don’t want to say you don’t have a choice, because you obviously have a choice, that sounds terrible!” she continues.
“He has just this very…he’s very trusting. He knows what he’s doing. He goes about doing it very safely and it’s great. Oh god, it was one of the first times I’ve ever squirted was on that scene. It was so good. I just wanted more after the scene. I was like Round 2!”
“I would shoot with him again for sure. I mean I suck dick pretty good from what I’ve heard. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”
Olsen reveals her mom is planning to join her at the AVN Awards.
“I’m very excited. She’s very supportive. I was surprised. Because when I first went out here to shoot I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing,” Olsen explains. “I thought I was going to come out here, shoot a few times, see if I liked it. I figured I wouldn’t like it because I am sexual but I always looked at myself as shy.
“So I was like I’m not going to be able to fuck on camera in front of 10 people and there’s lights and millions will be able to watch.”
It was her ex-boyfriend of four years that found out she was doing porn and told her parents.
“So the day he told my mom she didn’t call me or text me and I was like, oh my god, she’s going to disown me. She’s so upset and disappointed. I was on set and I get this voicemail from my mom and I was like I don’t even want to listen to this.”
But when she finally did listen to her mom’s message she was pleasantly surprised. “She [said], ‘I love you, I just want you to be safe and I want you to come home and talk to me about it’ and that was it,” Olsen says.
“I went home and at first no one said anything about it. It was a good month. But it wasn’t weird and nothing was different. I was going to come out for my second trip and my mom a day before was like, ‘hey can I talk to you alone?’ I knew what was going to be happening and she sat me down in her room. She starts crying. ‘I love you so much, I just want you happy.’ She was like, ‘I would rather be here for you than you do it on your own.’
“And I’m very happy, very happy—very blessed. Because you hear about some girls—their parents disown them or take all their money. I’m very lucky. I mean my mom’s coming to AVN’s to support me this year. I told her a while back if I get nominated this year for an award, you better come out and see me. I was talking to her about dress shopping.”
While Olsen now resides in the Boston area, she actually grew up in a small town in Kansas and moved close to New York City as a freshman in high school.
“When my parents moved me from Kansas to New York I was very sheltered,” Olsen remembers. “I didn’t know anything about drugs, alcohol, sex, nothing.”
But that all changed when Olsen was in high school, where she says she felt pressure to “fit in.”
“Everyone was having sex. Everyone was drinking and doing drugs and the whole nine yards. I was the only white girl. I was called ‘the white girl,’” she recalls.
“… I would run away to have sex with random people because I felt that urge to go have sex. I didn’t really masturbate I just had sex. Because I love the emotional connection with someone else. It’s one thing to masturbate and that’s one orgasm, but when you actually have sex with someone it’s like a different orgasm, at least for me.
“It got to the point where I was having sex in school and on the school bus I was blowing some guy in the backseat. Got in trouble and caught for that. My sophomore year of high school I actually got kicked out for having sex. Me and this guy, it was during class and we both made an excuse. I was known as the perfect student. … So when I was like, ‘oh I need to go to the nurse’s office,’ they believed that and were like, ‘ok, yeah go ahead,’ and we met in the hallway and went to the stairwell and started fucking. I was on the cheerleading team. I cheered for football and basketball. And the basketball coach walked in. And he caught us and that day I got called down to the principal’s office and got kicked out of high school for it.”
Olsen continues, “My parents put me in this sex rehab place, a few of them. Twice they did my sophomore year of high school. I just couldn’t stop. I loved sex. I loved it. And then we moved out to New Hampshire my junior year of high school and I met a guy, fell in love with him. I was with him for four years up until February. And now that I’m a single again, I’m like woo hoo, I’m branching out into my old ways. But I look at porn as a safe way to do that.”
Olsen also briefly worked at a strip club before porn, but not as a dancer.
“I did topless massages there and I think that’s kind of what got my feet a little wet too being able to show my tits to someone,” she says. “I did that for six months and then after that I went and got my real estate license and started selling real estate. But the thing with real estate you could go months of work without getting a commission if you don’t sell any properties or rent any properties out. And at the time I was a little 19-year-old girl and who’s going to want to buy a house from a 19-year-old girl? Right away I got a bartending job for definite income to come in.”
Now Olsen, who graduated from high school when she was 16 and wanted to study criminal justice to become a lawyer, is trying to do the adult industry the right way. For starters, she talks to her co-star before a sex scene to find out what makes him tick.
“I ask the guy, ‘do you have any don’t’s?’” Olsen explains. “‘What do you like? What works for you to help you cum?’ I want to know everything so the scene is fucking great and awesome.
“I try to connect with my partner before and get to know them a little bit so it’s not just like, ‘hey I’m fucking you today. Hi, put your dick in me.’ That kind of thing. I try to develop relationships.”
She’s also saving a lot of what she makes.
“I really am into investing my money and saving it right now, so I’m hoping to be able to get out and maybe invest in some real estate,” says Olsen, adding that her only splurge was a new car.
“I can’t imagine myself working for someone else ever again. That sounds terrible to me. I never want to do that again. I really would like to switch over behind the camera to a producing kind of thing because that interests me and I think that’d be really fun. I want to stay in for a few more years. By the time I’m 30 I want to be out.
“I’m happy right now. I’m happy with where I am with my life. I’m very happy with my job. I absolutely love it.”
Photo by Jeff Koga.
