LOS ANGELES—Mia Malkova wants her new castle to become a haven for adult content production, a place where her fellow performers can be creative and thrive.
“We hope to invite a lot of girls to the castle and fly them out and shoot them here,” Malkova tells AVN. “We want everything to be done right.
“We want the girls to feel very comfortable and we want to shoot very high-quality gonzo scenes is what we’re thinking.”
The superstar performer, who won the 2014 AVN Award for Best New Starlet, realized a dream with her recent purchase of Blackberry Castle, a 13,000 square foot, 6.5 acre luxury estate in Portland, Oregon.
She and her boyfriend—adult producer/director Eli Tucker—and a silent partner acquired the stunning property for $3.9 million in December and intend to turn it into a “Disneyland” for adult content shoots.
Malkova and Tucker already have begun renovating the castle’s many rooms as they prepare to ramp up production for their new label, Muse, in the coming weeks. The content for Muse will be available on the studio’s OnlyFans page.
They already have installed hardwood floors and now have turned their attention to interior decorating.
“The castle feels like it’s not finished,” Malkova explains. “There is so much that needs to be done and the place is huge. We want every room to be some sort of theme and we’re going to start with the master bedroom. We like the idea of sort of a Disneyland-type of house—magical and immersive."
Tucker tells AVN the property cost the original owners $7.2 million to build four years ago.
“We’re really stoked on it,” Tucker says. “We have the blueprints and receipts for everything. They went all out on the architecture. They had a muralist hand-paint the ceilings. There is reclaimed wood in the library, river rock from Bend, Oregon, a three-story fireplace, an underground wine cellar built into the side of this mountain and the largest ceiling clock in the Pacific Northwest.”
Malkova, a native of Southern California who debuted in adult in 2012, says walking around her new second home is nothing short of “surreal.”
“Honestly, I really like fantasy. I like all the geeky things,” Malkova jokes. “I saw this property about a year ago on Zillow, when we were looking for property in Oregon. It has its own theater and a Roman bath... It’s just beautiful.
“I saved it and just said this is my dream home, maybe someday. But I had no intention of ever getting it.”
Malkova last year did buy her first home, which she describes as “a little log cabin” near Oregon's Mt. Hood National Forest “that’s been amazing to live in.”
But then when the castle came back on the market recently, Malkova and Tucker got serious about it.
“Our cabin doesn’t have great internet and I like streaming on Twitch, so I was looking for another spot and the Castle was available again. We did the numbers and we said, ‘We could get this...’ And we went for it,” Malkova adds.
Malkova and Tucker intend to keep their cabin, which will be their main residence, while they use Blackberry Castle as their work space.
She says it’s been more than two years since she last shot a scene for someone other than for her own platform.
“I’m happy doing what I’m doing. I like making my own schedule and choosing my own wardrobe, hiring my own makeup artist. I'm really enjoying building my own brand and shooting the content that I love,” says Malkova, who has flourished on OnlyFans.
“I like to focus a lot of my content around cosplay and nature. Those are two things I’m trying to put more effort into. I find it a lot more more rewarding working for myself and getting residuals instead of a daily check, and doing things how I want to do them in the comfort of my own home.”
Malkova says she is thankful to have reached this point in her career.
“I feel blessed,” she continues, adding that she does not consider herself “retired” from performing for other studios. But it would have to be a particular project.
“If there is something that piques my interest, I’ll do it,” she says.
Malkova’s enormous social media following includes more than 7.4 million on Instagram and another 1.2 million on Twitter, making her one of the most followed adult performers in the world.
“My Instagram is doing very well,” she says. “I would say I became very passionate about the photos I was taking and I became very consistent.”
Malkova recalls how she used to not be the biggest fan of social media a few years ago because she likes being a private person.
“But I really fell in love with it when I started dating my current boyfriend who is a photographer,” she says. “Now it’s fun, and I think me becoming passionate about it was what helped it grow so fast. I’m struggling with Instagram right now because there is this war on sex workers going on. There’s a huge purge going on and I’ve noticed a lot of sex workers’ accounts are dropping.”
She says her Instagram has been shadow-banned since Instagram’s latest update on Dec. 20.
“That’s unfortunate and that’s something I’m trying to work on, but I still think it’s worth putting effort into it.”
Malkova started her Twitch channel two years ago and has fallen in love with the community.
“I’ve had a lot of success. It’s something I’m passionate about. I love gaming and I love the community. I love that I can do it from home,” she says. “There is massive potential for it to be lucrative but I don’t really care about that. It’s more of a passion project. I haven’t been on Twitch for five or six months because our cabin didn’t have great internet, so I’m excited to have internet at the castle."
The performer says she likes to save most of her game-time for live streams. She has clocked more than 400 hours playing The Witcher, completing every Side Quest in the process. Sometimes she plays Among Us on her phone, but has yet to play on Twitch.
“I like fantasy role-playing games,” she says. “I hope to get back into World of Warcraft, Tomb Raider, Assassin’s Creed, the new Harry Potter game.
Malkova held two jobs before adult. She was a cashier at McDonald’s at 16 and two years later she worked as a hostess at Sizzler.
“I actually loved both of them,” she says. “The McDonalds one I would have fun at but it was so close to the high school and sometimes I would see my friends come in and I was a little embarrassed about it.
“… I loved my job there at Sizzler. It was just fun, I liked the people I worked with. It was easy to talk to the customers. I was never bored. … I did have sex with one of my managers at Sizzler. I hit on him while we were at work and we went out afterwards.”
The Arizona native Tucker, meanwhile, broke into adult in 2015 after years working as a line cook in Portland and then Alaska, where he also was a sous chef at Mt. McKinley Wilderness Lodge for Princess Cruises. A year before he began shooting porn, he was photographing weddings.
But it was while he was an apprentice videographer and photographer at Vixen Media Group that he learned from one of the best—the now-retired three-time AVN Director of the Year Greg Lansky, who co-founded the company.
“I worked hand in hand with Greg Lansky and he fast-tracked me,” Tucker says. “We started Blacked Raw together [in fall of 2017]. I was the sole director of that brand for the first year-and-a-half or so. I was working with him closely.”
Now independent and the co-owner of Muse, Tucker has been shooting Malkova’s content for the past two years and is ready to take his productions to the next level this year.
“I want to shoot my first professional scene here at the Castle for Muse on Valentine’s Day,” Tucker says. “We’ve spent a significant amount of money on renovations and furnishing the home. We’re waiting for a lot stuff. The previous owners were married for a while and this was kind of their dream home they were building. I’d say they got three quarters of the way through the build.
“But they didn’t get to finish all the plans they had.”
Malkova says Blackberry Castle has become well known in Portland. Their acquisition already has made national news as The Oregonian and the New York Post are among the mainstream news outlets that have documented the purchase.
“Everybody knows about Blackberry Castle, but nobody has really known what it looks like inside,” Malkova says. “That’s something we have to do, especially after the renovations, is shoot a lot of content tailored to this.”
“It’s still surreal," she adds. "… I’m not used to it.”
Photography by Eli Tucker
