LOS ANGELES—2023 AVN Awards Best Leading Actress Maitland Ward is relishing her latest, more mature role. Her character in MILFY.com’s American MILF series, also named Maitland, has just sent her son off to college, emptying the nest and leaving her with a mix of, for lack of a better word, emotions.
“You know, we all have ups and downs,” Ward told AVN. “It's about a group of friends in a neighborhood who love sex and they love, um, you know, finding their boy toys and everything. But it's also about what's going on in their lives, their storylines, and where they're coming from in their perspective.
“My character is coming from empty nest syndrome and being tired of her husband at home, and she's finding new outlets. She's a professor. She's not, you know—I won't say just a housewife, but it's not like the typical trope of what you assume is a MILF-mommy-housewife waiting at home and the milkman comes by,” she explained.
The five-part series, directed by multi-award-winning performer-director Kayden Kross, boasts an ensemble cast of mighty MILFs, including Christy Canyon, Phoenix Marie, Brandi Love, and Serenity Cox. In an atmosphere that thick with estrogen, it’s probably no wonder the ongoing narrative has been elevated and enriched with women’s stories and their take on being hot, older, and sexual.
“I think this is the first feature series that really focuses on MILFs as more complex, human characters than just the trope,” Ward surmised.
“It's the second most searched term in porn sites, and everybody loves that strong, sure woman who's older and wiser, and knows what she wants, and is good at what she wants, and then gets what she wants. But I think it's been so limited in the past. They haven't really explored a more mature woman,” she added.
The unflagging popularity of MILF content, it could be argued, is proof of empowerment for women of a certain age. In a recently resurfaced 2020 podcast interview, GOP Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance agreed with his conservative host that post-menopausal women exist mainly to be caregiving grandmothers—but industry trends seem to signal a cultural shift for viewers who appreciate and want mature women in their adult content.
Of course, with age comes experience, and that’s where acting ability can bring depth to a juicy MILF role, like the characters in American MILF. Ward feels that there’s also been a shift in cultural standards, especially since starting her mainstream acting career in the mid-‘90s. Thirty years ago, the furthest a mainstream actress could push boundaries would be to do a nude photo spread in Playboy or Maxim. Audiences today, she said, are more accepting of explicit content as just another entertainment genre, like anime or horror.
A teen when she debuted in the CBS soap opera The Bold and Beautiful, Ward is probably best known for her role as Rachel McGuire on ABC’s Boy Meets World. After several TV and movie roles, she explored cosplay, exhibitionism, and social media for a time before making the transition to adult content in 2019 when she was approached by Kross for the project that would become Deeper.com’s Drive.
“In the mainstream industry, when I was younger, past thirty-five, you were like dead until you were sixty,” Ward described. “You could play like moms, grandma, or your older roles. That was it, that was all you could play. But now we're seeing strong actresses continue their careers, like Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Garner—people who are in their fifties and going on sixties, and they're still thriving as leads.”
Ward eventually snagged several AVN Awards for acting and her fiery sexual performances. The first was a Best Supporting Actress in 2020 for Drive, followed by a Best Actress in 2021 for Muse, the 2023 Best Leading Actress award for Drift—all features directed by Kross for Deeper.com. Last year, she took home Best Actress for the featurette DP 6, The Casting Couch, produced by Tushy.com.
“When I won Best Actress for Drift, the producer for Boy Meets World—he had told me ahead of time,” she recalled. “He's been amazingly supportive. It is wild to see the people who have been supportive in my life of the journeys that I've taken that I never would have thought would so many years ago. He was like, don't say mainstream and porn—you're an actress. That's all—you're an actress.”
Ward said recognition has come from former colleagues and fans, and these days, it’s not just for her mainstream work. She described a recent interaction.
“One day, a woman who was in her thirties—a really sweet, cute woman—comes up to me at a restaurant; she had a kid and her husband at the table, too. But she came up to me separately and she goes, ‘I'm such a fan of your work,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, it's a Boy Meets World fan. That's sweet.’ You know, then she's like, “You and Kayden are so amazing. I watch everything.'
“I was like, ‘Wow.' And then her husband came up from the table and he says, ‘I know. She, she's such a fan. She just cannot miss any of your films that you make.’ And I was like, ‘That is a difference.’”
To watch American MILF, Episodes 1-5, visit MILFY.com.
