LOS ANGELES—Alexis Tae admits she used to fast-forward to the finale of sex scenes before she started doing them herself.
“I like to skip to the end—like the last three minutes,” Tae jokes. “I want to see the cumshot. That’s about it. I wanna see somebody cum and that’s that.”
Whether she was watching pop-shots on Pornhub or YouPorn, Tae knew only a couple performers by name during those days.
“Like Abella [Danger] I knew of; Gina Valentina I knew of; Riley Reid, obviously,” Tae recalls. “I actually used to read erotic stories. I still kind of like doing that. Actually, if I were to get off to anything that would be what it is now.
“I just like real-life stuff or husband-wife. I like cuckold fantasies. I like reading about that.”
Now the 21-year-old stunner from Pittsburgh is becoming a fantasy herself. The former violinist and track star ditched the hustle of food service jobs for the bright lights of Southern California’s Porn Valley in January and hasn’t looked back.
“I was starting to think I need do something that I don’t have to work like I was,” Tae says. “Because I was working at restaurants, so that’s 12-hour days, seven days a week and it just never stops. So I had to stop and I started looking up agents and I got in contact with John [O’Byrne].”
It didn’t take any convincing for the owner of East Coast Talents, O’Byrne, to recognize Tae was someone who could get booked early and often in Los Angeles.
“I think he was the first person to reply to me,” Tae remembers. “He was the first person I talked to and just his energy on the phone—it was super cool. He was really enthusiastic about it... Then I started talking to other people and still just came right back to John.
“That was in December. Then I started probably three weeks later [in early January].”
After attending the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas in January, Tae was positive she wanted to find out where porn would take her.
“It was a lot at first because I didn’t have a video out at the time, so I was just networking with people and all of that,” she says. “So I have some things I’ll change next year but it was a good experience.
“I researched the whole industry in general before I got into it, just like the shitty things that are going to come up and the good things about it—all sides of it.
“I don’t really do anything unless I pretty much know what to do.”
Even though it’s only been about four months, it's safe to say Tae is getting acclimated.
“She’s great on set; she loves doing this,” O’Byrne tells AVN. “She’s an ex-athlete; she loves running, loves working out… You just see how much more bright the room is when she smiles. She has a great work ethic. She wants to come in and bust her ass and do the best that she can.”
O’Byrne continues, “She shot for NetVideoGirls for her first scene. She wound up shooting one week before AVN’s. She spent one week in California and loved it and came back from AVN and has been on fire. … She’s very bubbly and very energetic.”
Tae says she did her homework by perusing AVN.com.
“I remember going on the AVN site and seeing all the talent. I was going through the guys like OK, who’s hot? Who do I have to look forward to?” she says.
One of the guys who caught her eye was the notorious HookupHotshot, Bryan Gozzling.
“Beforehand I was like, ‘He’s so hot. I can’t wait to work with him.’ I remember John texted me and he was like, ‘Do you want to do this site?’ And I was like, ‘Yes!’” Tae says.
She had not even told O’Byrne that Gozzling’s “extreme online dating site” was on her wishlist.
“No, I just like manifested it,” Tae says. “That’s how I’ve been feeling lately.”
Tae made the most of her opportunity with Gozzling, the native of New Haven, Conn., whose movies are distributed by Evil Angel.
“I think Alexis is top-notch,” Gozzling tells AVN. “She is the kind of performer I hope to shoot with every scene. She has a great attitude, clearly enjoys sex and performing for others, and she is a natural beauty with a unique look.
“Attitude and enthusiasm are so important in a performer and Alexis not only has these great characteristics, she's also drop-dead gorgeous. I think the world of her.”
Gozzling continues, “Alexis has a natural love for sex that really came through in our scene together for HookupHotshot.com. That is extremely important to me and when I find it in another performer it really energizes me. Honestly, I wouldn't change a single thing about our scene. To me it was perfect and 90 percent of that was due to Alexis' energy and performance.
“HookupHotshot scenes are clearly not for everyone, just like a lot of porn, but Alexis is the kind of performer my members and I hope for each week. She really took it to the next level and I can't wait to bring her back. She was incredible.”
Tae also impressed the only man to win the AVN Male Performer of the Year award three consecutive times—Austrian super-stud Mick Blue, who drilled her in her second scene in LA for BAM Visions.
“It was amazing to work with Alexis Tae,” Blue, who won the top honor for a male performer from 2015-17, tells AVN. “She is very natural when it comes to sex. You can feel her passion for it and it shows in the scenes. Besides that she also has a wonderful look. I think she is in the right place to feed her passion and has a long future. Can’t wait to shoot her for Throated.com this upcoming week.”
Tae thought about stripping in Pittsburgh, but then realized, “it’s such a small town—everybody knows my dad.”
“I would go to the strip club one time and they’d be like, ‘Hey, your daughter’s on stage,’” she jokes.
It didn’t take long for word to get around back home that Tae had broken into the porn biz.
“Everyone knows,” she says. “My first scene that came out was my Hookup Hotshot and this girl who’s a really big stripper in Pittsburgh quote-tweeted it and said, ‘Oh, I love when girls from high school become sex workers.’ But she didn’t do that to be like, ‘You go girl!’ She did that to be kind of backhanded. But she did the hard part for me. I didn’t have to tell anybody. Everybody knows and luckily, nobody cares.”
Now about 30-something scenes later, Tae tells AVN she no doubt made the right decision.
“Definitely, I like it a lot. It’s the job for me,” Tae says. “I like the people in it and the openness because you can walk into any room and pretty much say anything or do anything and it’s just like, ‘Alright. We’ve seen that, we’ve done that.’
“There’s no surprise factor. There’s nothing to hold back. That’s refreshing.”
Tae brought her enthusiasm to four different BJ scenes in the same week in late March.
“My Swallowed [scene] that I did was so much fun because it was with other girls and I don’t get to work with girls that much,” she says.
Tae performed for Mike Adriano’s all-oral site Swallowed with Izzy Lush and Chanel Grey; the trio blew Alex Jones.
“We all kind of brought something different to it—it was nice,” Tae notes.
She also did a scene involving something she knows more than the average porn star about—sushi.
“I haven’t seen it yet but the PornPros that I did in Florida with the sushi is going to be super cool to see everything because that was so hot,” she says. “[Tyler Steel] placed each bit of sushi on me and he gives me a bite, rubs a piece on me and feeds it to me again. I really liked working with Tyler and he was also my BangBus [scene], too.”
Tae learned how to roll sushi at one of her approximately 10 restaurant jobs, comparing it to “like rolling a joint.”
“It’s the exact same thing but with food,” she explains. “The hardest part is the top of it and decorating it. Because you want it to be perfect and slicing avocado you have to do it so barely with the tip of your knife. And if that avocado is not perfectly ripe you’re just screwed. Half the time I’m sitting there and I cut it open and I’m like, ‘This is gonna be disgusting looking.’
“So that was a fun job. It’s just cutting fish for eight hours a day kind of gets to you. And it smells a lot and that smell never goes away.”
After leaving her sushi gig she worked at another upscale Asian eatery, where she found herself making delivery runs in high heels.
“I would dress like this to work because it’s a nice restaurant and you want to look very nice but then I’m walking up 10 flights of stairs and delivering Chinese food and sushi. But it would work in my favor because sometimes you get a little extra tip if you look nice,” she says with a grin.
Tae got more than the tip from J-Mac, who boned her on a massage table for Exotic4k in another one of her early porn encounters.
“J-Mac is great; he is a solid man for sure,” she says. “That should look cool because I was just shaking my ass and just the angles that they had will be really cool. That was my first day in Florida.
“My first scene was Girls Gone Wild—that was in Florida. It was in the tattoo shop. So I did a solo and then I’ve never seen this video still. So I refuse to watch it… Oh my gosh, I’d imagine it’s so awkward. There’s no way it can’t be.”
Tae paired off with Mia Martinez, who got a penis tattoo during the shoot.
“She actually got it that day,” Tae says. “She got a dick tattooed on herself during the scene. That was my first introduction to porn. I was like, ‘So this is it!’ Crazy…”
Tae says she was so nervous before the scene, “I was literally shaking.”
Now that she has settled in more she enjoys doing threesomes. “I’ve done two—one with Kiarra Kai and one with Vina Sky.”
“That one with Kiarra Kai for Team Skeet just came out so that was the day of my agency pictures,” Tae explains. “And you’ll see my hair is a mess in all the pictures from that because they took the stills halfway through. Because I am black; my hair’s not naturally straight. When I get sweaty and get into it my hair is crazy. So I’m all into it and thinking, ‘Oh OK, this is great.’ Then they said, ‘Stills!’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean, stills?’
“I like working with Kiarra because that’s my closest friend in the industry. She is the first person I ever met, too.
“So we actually like performing together. ... And then the one with Vina was with Mofos and that will be a hot scene for sure. It was with Bambino. He was great, too.
“I have another Mofos that’s waiting to come out… There’s some stuff where I’m like—I forgot I did that.”
Tae at the time of this interview also had her sights set on working for Kink.com.
“I’m into that a lot. I definitely like the bondage and the BDSM stuff,” she confesses. “That’s fun for me. ... There’s nothing to it except just being there. That’s why I liked the Hookup Hotshot so much because it was natural. He just dommed me and was great at it and I just was there. I was very happy, clearly.”
Tae continues, “I like being tied up and choked. I just like rougher stuff and so I want to explore everything. Because I haven’t really gotten to explore that much in my personal life because boys are scared—or they were scared of me in Pittsburgh. Now I’m like, ‘Whoa, I have so many guys that want to do stuff.”
“I was in the Kink Lair the whole time at AVN, like, ‘Hello, this is what I love to do.’”
Tae says a “dream” of hers would be to take on two guys. “I really want to do that,” she says.
She likes to listen to R&B, but before shoots it's usually rap music to “get hyped and feel good about myself.”
“I’m a music lover. I like literally all of them. I like Frank Ocean a lot—Frank Ocean-type R&B and rap… I like anything with lots of instruments in it because I used to play violin. So I appreciate the actual music part of it.”
Tae played violin from the age of 10 until she graduated. “I still have my violins. I haven’t for a really long time. Now I’m like scared to play because it’s been so long,” she says.
“I was going to do music therapy outside of high school…That’s a lot of money, that’s a lot of time, that’s double majoring. That was the original goal was to bridge both of them.”
She did Orchestra in high school, performing at The Benedum Center—a theater and concert hall—in Pittsburgh.
“And I did chorus and we performed everywhere for chorus. So I was pretty musical growing up,” she says.
The well-rounded babe also ran the 400-meter dash and 4x400 relay on the track team.
“I actually got a state medal. Yeah, super proud of it,” she says, noting it was her sophomore year when she made the podium.
“Track was my life. I would eat, breathe, sleep track. That’s all I would do, all I would think about it," Tae recalls. "I would sit on Twitter and look at stats. For races I would look at everyone’s stats and compare and go on YouTube and look at what I had to do to get .02 seconds faster. I miss putting my whole heart into something like that."
She adds, “I’m starting to get the missing-track bug. Because I completely didn’t look at anything track-related or running related for years after. Because I was just like, fuck. I feel like I just ruined my chances because I had things to look forward to with track and then I didn’t end up doing any of it. But now I’m starting to watch and appreciate it again…"
Now Tae is approaching porn “day by day" and enjoying herself.
“I make goals for things but I don’t make goals in the sense that, ‘This is the only thing ever that I could ever do. If I don’t do this then I’m going to fail,'" she says. "I probably will end up getting out of the industry, eventually. Not to get out of the industry in general but to do something—mixing something else with the industry.
“I always talk about being a sex therapist because I always wanted to be a psychologist, so now I can kind of take it another way.
“But I also want to continue to be educated because that was the other big appeal of why I got into porn is so I can finally pay for things. I’ve always wanted to go to school and now I can pay for it. And that’s wonderful. I have to stay focused on that, too.”
Check out more of Alexis on her new AVN Stars account.
Photography by Rick Garcia/@IndustrybyRick
