Above, Matiland Ward in Drive (Deeper.com). A version of this interview ran in the November issue of AVN magazine. Click here for the digital edition.
Porn Valley stars who cross over to Hollywood are rare indeed, but rarer still is the mainstream actor who chooses to shoot porn. That’s the path taken by Maitland Ward, best known for her role on the Disney television series Boy Meets World.
Ward talked to AVN back in September, shortly after she wrapped her first big adult feature movie. The mainstream star was cast opposite Angela White in Drive, an ambitious drama directed by Kayden Kross for her Deeper.com imprint.
Today, just three months after Ward made a huge splash in her debut on Blacked.com, director Kross broke the news that the actress has signed an exclusive contract with Deeper.com. Kross is already in production on Ward’s next project, and the Deeper team couldn’t be happier to have the red-hot redhead on board, after she broke sales records with her scenes in Drive.
In a statement issued today, Kross said, “I'm so excited to have the opportunity to work with Maitland even more closely on more projects,” noting that she met Ward in a coffee shop earlier this year and signed her to star in Drive that very day. “Her work on Drive was iconic, and her abilities as an actress coupled with her untethered sexuality will allow us to continue to explore and experiment with complex storylines and intense sexual situations that are quickly becoming the hallmark of Deeper.”
How did Ward go from working with Disney in 1998 to shooting with AVN’s Director of the Year and Female Performer of the Year in 2019? It’s an inspiring journey of sexual exploration that began a few years ago, sparked by Ward’s love of cosplay—and one that has, according to director Kross, made Ward the second person in OnlyFans history to gross six figures in a month.
A native of Long Beach, California, Ward got her start in mainstream acting when she was still in her teens. Ward reminisces, “I was very straitlaced and innocent when I was younger. … I had a great childhood. It was very innocent. And then I got on a soap opera when I was 16 or 17. But actually I was very innocent on that show,” she says with a laugh.
Ward attended several colleges while she was working as an actor, including Long Beach State University. Then she went to New York University and came back to the West Coast to study screenwriting at UCLA. “That’s also a passion of mine. I write a lot of dark, twisted comedy and also erotic stuff. I love that kind of stuff. Naturally I like to be funny too. I think that can all be incorporated.”
A few years ago, Ward said, “I had kind of left the mainstream acting.” But then the show Girl Meets World hit the air in 2014, and there was renewed interest in the original series—and in Ward herself. “I’m a big nerd at heart, and I do a lot of cosplay. So I started getting a lot of attention for my crazy cosplay outfits and all my sexy setups,” Ward recalls. “My social media started to pick up and grow, and I got a lot of press from it.” Ward did Slave Leia on May 4 and got picked up by the Star and the Daily Mail, and things went from there.
But she soon found limitations on social media. “I would do nudie stuff on my Snapchat, like exhibitionist stuff, but then I kept getting complained about and they would take them down. It was people trying to censor what I wanted to do. So then people were saying, ‘You should do content.’ …
“I started a Patreon page just for the hell of it and it just blew up—it was No. 1 in adult for 2018 for individual and that’s how it started,” Ward continues. “At first it was just nudes and Playboy-esque type stuff, and then I started branching out.” At first, Ward recruited her husband to help with Snapchat videos. “It was just like my content—I didn’t put a label on it, and I didn’t think I needed to put a label on it. It was just my sexual adventures. That’s how it started out. I didn’t set out to say, ‘I’m going to do porn.’”
Above, Maitland Ward in her first Blacked.com shoot.
Crossing Over From Cosplay
Next, Ward engaged with talent from the adult industry. She began shooting girl/girl content, starting with adult star Elle Alexandra then followed by scenes with Lily Love, Molly Stewart and Jayden Cole, among others. When she first shot with Alexandra, the veteran girl/girl performer opined that Ward might go further into adult entertainment. “We just did a cutesy shoot. … I enjoyed the whole aspect of it and I was free with myself. She saw it in me,” Ward remembers.
She finally crossed the threshold into boy/girl by giving a blowjob to A-list male star Isiah Maxwell. “Isiah’s the best. He’s one of my best friends in this business.”
Her cosplay adventures continued. “I eventually had two guys that I worked with a lot. Danny Mountain and Isiah Maxwell. I’ve worked with them seven or eight times each. I got really lucky. They both really helped me a lot to learn professionalism.” Mountain “played every holiday for me. He played Santa Claus, he was a leprechaun …,” Ward says. “He goes in full force. I could call him up and say, listen, will you do the Easter Bunny?”
From there, it was only a matter of time before major producers came calling. Ward signed with Society 15, the talent agency founded by multiple AVN Award winner Kendra Lust. “I love Kendra and she’s amazing. And so it seemed to be a good fit,” Ward says, adding, “She’s so professional and she’s had such a great career. She’s somebody who I definitely looked up to and trusted to lead my journey.”
Ward caught the industry’s eye at the XRCO Awards at the end of June, where she served as a trophy girl. She had just begun doing professional scenes, including a couple for VR Bangers, and had been booked by Blacked and Brazzers.
For someone with a background in cosplay and acting, virtual reality scenes were a good starting place for Ward. “I do this thing for my content where I tell bedtime stories and I act them out … and get my bedroom voice on,” Ward said. And this translated well to her first scene with performer Will Pounder. “I’m proud to say people like when I dirty talk, and I got to do a lot of that.” She also did a scene with John Strong where he plays a deadbeat tenant who “pays his rent with his tools,” Ward describes. “They really let me do my thing. … I like talking to the camera and acting out for the camera.”
She adds, “I really enjoyed how it looked. It was really fun to see. I have a nerdy following, too, that likes all that technical [stuff]; they would like having a virtual reality experience.”
But it was when the Blacked scene debuted at the beginning of August that Ward’s star power became apparent. Traffic on the site went through the roof as her fans clicked on the scene. Ward played a real estate agent, and her partner was Jason Luv. “I had such a great experience on that set. Really from the whole get-go, it’s such a professional, classy, wonderfully run machine and they treated me like a princess,” she says. “I had done modeling in years past and it felt like a magazine shoot. It was so high-end and everything was beautifully done.”
For Ward, it was the perfect place to start: at the top. "I really loved Greg Lansky’s work—how beautiful it is and how professional it is. So that was somewhere I wanted to be,” Ward said. “I was very excited when we brought that deal together.”
During the shoot, Ward reports, “I just felt very taken care of by the whole Lanksy team, Vixen. Everybody there. From the bottom to the top. You can call them any time. … It was amazing just to come straight out of the gate with that Blacked scene. Everybody was just, like, ‘Wow, what?’ People weren’t expecting it …. Everyone went to go see that scene.”
Photos of Maitland Ward courtesy of Vixen Media Group
Going Deeper
With only a handful of credits—her big Brazzers scene with Keiran Lee came out August 19—Ward then had the good fortune to draw the attention of Kayden Kross, who was hunting for the right person to play a key supporting role in Drive, her ground-breaking drama for Deeper. (See more about Drive in this month’s AVN magazine.)
For Ward, the project was a perfect fit. “My thing has always been, I wanted to incorporate good acting and production with hot sex—and this is like the ultimate,” she says. “It has an amazing script, it has amazing production, and it’s hot. That’s what I’ve been looking for.”
Both the scale of the production and the woman at its helm impressed Ward. She describes her first meeting with Kross: “We connected immediately. She’s amazing and she’s such a phenomenal director. I’m so happy to have worked on this project. … It’s so cool working with a strong female director.”
And working on the production itself, she says, “was like being on a huge movie set. [Kross] has such a cool and unique vision for what she likes to do. And from what I’ve seen, which is just pieces on the monitors and shots, it’s beautiful and it’s gonna be fantastic.”
Ward also got the chance to work with another adult powerhouse: Manuel Ferrara. In Drive, she and Ivy Lebelle share the six-time AVN Male Performer of the Year. “He was amazing. So much fun. He’s so giving, too. It was a joy, the whole setup. He’s great to just talk to and be with. I had a fantastic time,” Ward said. “Manuel is so considerate and helpful.”
Together, as director and co-star, the real-life couple put the newbie at ease. “It’s cool with Kayden and Manuel and everything, how they lead up [to a sex scene]. … It’s very seductive, and then you’re in it. The whole dance of it all is so sexy.”
Asked what was the hardest part of working on Drive, Ward admits it was “having to flog a guy and saying dialogue around it and make the flogging work with the timing. … It was mostly because I was trying to do the flogger right, to make it look like I’m serious.”
On screen, Ward couldn’t look more serious. Charged with the task of psychologically dominating co-star Angela White, Ward gets into her role, dragging White around like a disobedient pet as they explore the dark interior of a sex club in the movie’s climactic scene. Throughout, Ward exudes both sensuality and authority.
Working on Drive dovetailed perfectly with Ward’s own ambitions for erotic entertainment. “That’s my vision—to have great acting and writing, producing and directing with the hot sex, so this like is the perfect project. I never expected it, and especially to come so soon—where I was thrown into something where I did so much acting and that had so much high production value. The acting part was so great, to do this sexual acting. It was really cool.”
Shock and Awe
Now that she’s crossed over to full-on porn stardom, Ward seems completely comfortable in her own skin and happy with her choices. “People are asking, ‘Are you stigmatized?’ I don’t feel like I’ve been stigmatized. I think people are—the word is curious. ‘Is she the same person?’ And I totally am. I think they’re fascinated. I get old friends asking me about the business. They want to know about it but they were too afraid to ask anybody, and now they know me. I think it definitely shocked a lot of people along the way, but I like shocking people. That’s one of my biggest things. I’m a good shocker. I like to push the boundaries and push limits and take chances. It’s not fun to me if I just stay in the same place.”
How did she shock people before she worked in porn? Ward says, “It started with dressing sexy, doing exhibitionist things. One thing I’ve done in the past, many times, is I’ve gotten body painted. And I walked down a busy street body-painted, naked, crossed the street where everybody could see.”
Such exploits are what grew her fan base to begin with, and Ward says they’ve been able to follow her into straight-up adult entertainment. “I brought my fan base along because I did it so incrementally,” she says, referring to her many devotees on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat.
“My fan base is so fervent and fiercely loyal. I have guys who’ve been with me through the whole journey. It really has been a journey, and it’s a continuing journey. I took it in such steps that I think I brought everybody along. … I’m really grateful for all of them. I think it’s just been fun for them and for me to see the metamorphosis into all this stuff. They were behind me every step of the way when I was getting kicked off of things—Instagram was taking my posts down, and Snapchats and everything. It feels like it’s been a big journey. My fan base has been growing this year a lot from all the stuff I’ve been doing. I’m really excited.”
She muses, “I was talking to several people who look at numbers and scenes, and people commented on the fact that I bring people in who don’t watch porn. … That’s an interesting thing, and I think that’s really cool because I’m helping usher in people to watch it—like, they wouldn’t normally do it and they don’t normally have a subscription. I think that’s neat. I hope I can be a go-between to bring people to the other side and say, ‘It’s not such a scary place. It’s fun—we can all have fun.’ Certain people get nervous about it. Even people who watch it privately don’t want to admit it.”
Now that she’s here in Porn Valley—both figuratively and literally—Ward says she wants to continue exploring the nexus of mainstream entertainment and porn. She sincerely believes that there are many things mainstream could learn from adult entertainment about incorporating real sex in narrative stories.
“I think people would watch it if it’s a really great story and a vision, and then you have this hot sex. It feels like it’s taboo for mainstream to go there, but I don’t think we’re that far off. … It’s really on the edge, but are we going to just go there? As a society, I wish we could. Especially in certain circumstances. I don’t know. We probably need a new rating system. … When I see films where they’re being really sexually erotic, if they actually had sex it would make it so much more heightened. …
“It’s really cool that Kayden is able to get to that place with [Drive]. I do think a lot of these artist types, especially young directors coming up, would love to explore that.”
She adds, “I do a lot of cosplay too, and that’s also an idea. I’d like to have a hot, sexually powerful comic book heroine. … If you could just push things a little further, then you have such a great setup. People get so hung up about seeing dicks and porn and everything. I don’t think the younger generation is like that.”
But most of all, for Ward, going into adult entertainment was about embracing her own identity, her own desires, her individual path in life. Before she made the leap, “People would say, ‘Oh, she won’t do it. She’s mainstream.’ I’m like, ‘I want to do what I want to do and I have no fear. I just want to be authentic to who I am.’”
In mainstream, her world was too limited, Ward asserts. "When there was renewed interested in Boy Meets World and Girl Meets World, people would offer roles like as the soccer mom—which is fine, but that’s not what I wanted to do. One time I told a publicist, ‘No, I like to do my sexy stuff,’ and he said, ‘No, no, no, you were on that show. They won’t hire you for that. You’re not going to be able to do sexy stuff.’
“Look at me now,” she says. “I proved them all wrong.”
