A version of this feature appears in the November 2024 issue of AVN magazine. Click here for the digital edition.
LOS ANGELES—Serenity Cox smiles when she thinks about it.
The 15-year veteran ER nurse from Toronto took an unlikely path to porn stardom that began when she and her husband decided to add a new dimension to their sex life during the pandemic. Their experiments with the hotwife lifestyle first led to them uploading their amateur content to FetLife and then to Pornhub, where they soon found an enthusiastic audience that wanted more.
Less than three years later—in May 2024—Cox landed an exclusive performance contract with Vixen Media Group and found herself in the starting lineup for the Super Bowl of hotwifing—joining an ensemble cast for Vixen Media Group’s splashy five-part feature American MILF, which rolled out in September through their MILFY label.
It all escalated quickly for Cox, who tells AVN hotwifing was a hobby that she never imagined would lead her to this moment.
"I’ve been with my husband for 13 years and we’ve had an evolving sex life as couples do have,” Cox explains. “Then in 2020, everyone went a little bit crazy during the pandemic. We had been in our monogamous marriage and we had been having hotwife type role play and fantasies forever, but we never acted on it. And then 2020 comes along and we’re just like, ‘The world is ending! Fuck it, let’s just do what we want to do.’
“So it wasn’t about filming back then, it was just about us having fun together and inviting other people into our intimate moments.”
As their explorations progressed, Serenity and her hubby would film themselves in threesomes from his POV.
“And we were very private about what we were doing,” she says. “We were working our jobs and people didn’t know what our lifestyle was.”
Then in 2021 they decided to try posting on Pornhub because they heard they might get free swag if they got to a certain amount of subscribers.
“Because we were getting better and we were starting to make our videos for the feedback and that was part of the excitement,” Serenity says.
But after she won Best Newcomer at the 2022 Pornhub Awards, she realized she might be onto something bigger.
“That’s when we had a serious conversation about making this more of a business as opposed to just a silly hobby,” she says.
Enter Vixen Media Group, the studio heavyweight that first reached out to her through Twitter in early 2023. But Cox says she wasn’t familiar with the company’s stature in the industry and wasn’t ready to make the jump.
“Because I had never considered the professional world before,” she says.
That changed in September of 2023, when VMG connected with her again. This time Cox had done her research and said yes, doing her first-ever scene last November with Dan Damage.
“It was a blast, so much fun. It was a hotwife scene,” Serenity says. “And then after that it was like I don’t know if I’ll hear from them again, and I went home to do my thing and it was literally two weeks later they had a performer fall through or something and I guess my name got brought up and they called me and were like, ‘Do you want to go to the Dominican Republic for a week and do a couple scenes for MILFY?’”
So she did, working with world class studs Alberto Blanco and Jason Luv under the direction of Julia Grandi. Fast forward to April and VMG reached out again—but this time it was with an exclusive contract offer.
“It was kind of an easy ‘yes’ because it was never even on my radar to do professional scenes and then to have Vixen ask me to be a contract performer for them—I thought this is just so ridiculous. I still find the whole thing funny,” Cox admits. “I don’t want it to seem like I’m downplaying it or not appreciating it enough, but it was never something on my radar. My normal day-to-day life is just so average.”
She adds, “For me the whole journey has been mostly about exploring and opening up an alternative lifestyle, like going from this monogamous, everyday average life to being like let’s just say ‘yes’ to new things and new experiences.”
Cox calls the experience of being in American MILF “surreal.” Not only was the production huge by any measure, she also shared the set with a cast of porn superstars in Brandi Love, Maitland Ward, Christy Canyon and Phoenix Marie.
“They were all lovely,” Serenity says. “Going into it I was a little bit intimidated before I met them but they were all just so down to earth. Everybody made me feel really comfortable. So I went from feeling like this outsider, like is this a joke, why am I part of this project? To just feeling like I was one of the gang, so it was nice.”
She performed with reigning AVN Male Performer of the Year Isiah Maxwell in her scene, which was the first one released from American MILF. For Cox, Maxwell came as advertised.
“That was the first time I met him,” Serenity says of Isiah, who started his performing career in 2013, two years after breaking into adult as an intern at Ideal Image Models. “He’s such a gentleman, so friendly. He’s got this smile and you just kind of melt.”
Cox's second sex scene in American MILF— which involved her taking on Jason Luv along with her co-stars—received a 2025 AVN Award nomination for Best Foursome/Orgy Scene.
She tells AVN there really is no comparison to performing on a VMG set and creating her own content at home in Toronto.
“It’s a completely different entity and you’re in a different mindset as well,” Serenity explains. “It’s like I have two different jobs. It’s weird calling it a job, like it’s not really. So when I do my own stuff, my husband films it all. So it’s very comfortable and it’s usually like friends of ours.
“It’s just like a really tight crew that we do our independent stuff with. And the professional thing is people I don’t know, a room full of people.
“But I changed my mindset from this is actual my sex life and documenting my sexual experiences versus creating art or creating a fantasy that other people can consume and watch.”
Cox admits it wasn’t easy leaving her nursing career in February because she had been immersed in it for so long. For starters, she had developed great admiration and respect for her colleagues.
“I worked with an amazing team. It was a fulfilling job. It was stressful as hell but it’s a good job,” she says. “I think it was slowly killing me because since I left I feel so much healthier.”
Serenity says there came a point where she was earning her entire annual nursing salary in one month on OnlyFans.
“And because I was working shift work I was actually saying no to some opportunities that would’ve advanced my adult career because I was faithful to my nursing career,” she continues.
The decision weighed on her.
“It was a big decision because I do have to look at it like, what’s best for my health? What’s best for my family, my quality of life? And really I was just staying with nursing because I felt guilty to leave,” Cox admits.
“Healthcare in Canada is just as shit as anywhere else, where there’s not enough staff and the wait times are too long. So I felt a lot of guilt leaving that because I felt like I was abandoning the team.
“So I did struggle with leaving for a while but I’m glad I did because at the end of the day working shift work and also having a growing adult career was getting a bit too much.”
Even though she left, Serenity tells AVN she knows she’ll return to nursing in some capacity. It’s why she’s keeping her license and taking courses to stay current with her trauma certifications.
She reveals that she gravitated toward emergency nursing, thriving with the fast pace, the adrenaline rush and “the feeling like you’re actually doing something and helping people.”
Then about a decade ago she transferred to a large hospital that handled major traumas and fly-in patients.
“All units of hospitals are great in their own way but there’s something about emergency where you work like a team together because you’re spread so thin—and if you don’t work together like a choreographed dance then people are gonna die,” Serenity says.
“It’s just a unique form of healthcare and the relationship with the nurses and the doctor and all the different people in the team is less of like a hierarchy and it’s more of everybody’s in it together—and I just love that.”
Most of the time she was the charge nurse, orchestrating the entire shift.
“Like everybody comes to you… ‘I need a bed for this patient right now… The elevators are broken, what are you going to do about it?’ What fire are you gonna put out first? That’s what the shifts were like,” she explains.
“The doctors would come to you like this person’s not doing this or this person’s not doing that, what am I going to do about it? Calling up doctors and being like, ‘Why haven’t you come up with a diagnosis yet?’ You’re the communicator for everybody in the department.
“I’d come home and just drop onto the bed.”
Her co-workers knew what her side job was even though she hadn’t told many people.
“My videos were performing so well. They were always on the front page of Pornhub,” she says. “Somebody recognized me.”
Despite several meetings where she had to explain her exotic hobby, by the time she left everyone, including management, accepted it.
“Even my manager was like come back any time…you got your job here,” she says.
When she isn't spending time with her family or performing, she has continued to volunteer at a sexual health clinic for women, which offers free services such as STI testing.
“I’m trying to figure out how to redirect my healthcare specialty into more sexual health,” she says. “I also started doing some news anchor shifts on the Naked News… I’m a guest anchor sometimes for them. That’s kind of a hobby as well.”
Meanwhile, Cox tells AVN her husband has been supporting her every step of the way, sharing in every victory.
“For me behind the scenes this is a journey with me and my husband exploring our open relationship and trying new things,” she says.
“His enjoyment is seeing me open up sexually and seeing me being this exciting sexual person. So even though he’s not coming to LA and doing these shoots with me, just the fact that his wife is doing this is causing so much enjoyment for him as well.
“I come home and tell him about all these things and it’s exciting for us as a couple.”
She adds, “Not every relationship has to be this black and white monogamous by the book. There’s different things that work for different couples and this is us just enjoying things that might be taboo in a married relationship.”
Photography courtesy of Vixen Media Group
