This feature appears in the August issue of AVN magazine.
LOS ANGELES—It’s Saturday morning in Compton and there are scantily-clad, state-sponsored reality show assassins from the future running around, but no one seems to be aware of it.
Outside the old metalworks factory warehouse that looks like it was built in the ‘40s, with rusty corrugated steel walls and a razor-wired, 12-foot fence around the property, a couple of rebel prisoners wearing masks and tactical gear are playing hide-and-seek in the tall weeds and tagged-up, junked cars that litter the yard. They’re the ones being hunted by the assassins.
The sidearms and other weapons being brandished are all made of rubber, except for Cubbi Thompson’s. Her character is strapped up, but her weapon of choice is a heavy chain and it’s real. “I'm ready for combat,” Thompson grins. “Full on.”
A skilled adult performer, Thompson is playing an assassin named Mask, in a non-sex role. She doesn’t have sex in this movie because all her character does is kill, kill, kill.
“To some, I'm good. To others, I'm bad. But, you know, I'm an assassin. I'm a very well-trained assassin,” she cautioned. “I'm one of the killers for the elites.”
“Some people—some people, you just gotta take them out,” she added, holding up a mock TEC-9 style pistol and taking aim.
It’s the last day of a five-day shoot for Digital Playground’s dystopian thriller, The Tribunal. All the hardcore scenes are already “in the can,” so today is all action and fight scenes with some dialogue and fill-in shots. The four female leads—Abigaiil Morris, Emma Rosie, Thompson and Little Puck—are eager to kick some ass.
Ricky Greenwood is at the helm, with a script co-written by Shawn Alff, who won the 2026 AVN Award for Best Screenplay for Strip, also produced by Digital Playground and directed by Greenwood.
“It started—I was watching Barb Wire with Pamela Anderson, and I was, like ’Oh, my God, Abigaiil Morris will be so good in a movie’—so, I was trying to figure it out. We didn't want to do a parody of Barb Wire, but I knew I wanted to do a movie with her. So, I texted her.”
In Barb Wire, Anderson’s character is “kind of a hunter,” Greenwood mused. Then, he rewatched futuristic action thriller The Running Man, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the wrongly accused cop forced to compete as a “runner’” on a lethal reality competition show, hunted by “stalkers.”
Ironically, the 1987 movie’s official trailer says, “In 2017, an innocent man accused of a crime has a choice. Hard time or prime time? He must pay or play ‘The Running Man.’”
Time travel to 2026, and Greenwood is thinking, “Okay, those hunters—imagine if I have more hunters chasing people? I also love in Robocop, the newscaster and the fake news and fake commercials… Yeah, so, it's a mix of Robocop and Verhoeven-type of movies, mixed with Barb Wire and The Running Man, basically.”
Morris stars as a killer queen named Kansas. “Her heart is very much with the Resistance, but she's still working for the court,” the buxom star described. “So, she's still killing to get paid. She hunts down who they tell her to hunt down and it's supposed to be ‘no questions asked.’ It's very much like, this is what you have to do and you're going to do it. That's how you make money and survive in this post-apocalyptic environment. But her heart is very much still with the Resistance.”
Morris confessed that she’d found a very post-modern technique to prepare for her role. “So, I know everybody hates AI right now and I get why. I get it. But I was able to use it to my advantage,” she said.
“I used ChatGPT, and I was able to upload my script and I ran lines with it. It would like give me the line before my line and what my cue was, and I had to respond with the correct line or it would make me restart the script from the beginning,” Morris described.
“And I was able to get ChatGPT to design four different memory games for the script, to the point now, where somebody can give me a random line in the script, and I can tell you exactly what my line is after. It was phenomenal. It was the only way that I could think of that I could run lines, because it's a massive script and I wanted to be able to give it my all.”
Sunlight filtering through the antique windows illuminated dust motes floating in the warehouse air. The built-out sets at the facility are not air conditioned, but in the back are a few small rooms being used for makeup, wardrobe and a lounge which are cooled. Most everyone is congregated there, including several extras for the fight scenes.
“I love cyberpunk, I love dystopian—I just love the whole aesthetic,” Claudia Ross said. An accomplished director in her own right, Ross was managing the production and had been busy processing paperwork for the extras and stunt people. AVN Hall of Fame actor Tommy Pistol is PA on the set. Halfway through the day, he and Ross will compare “steps” on their phones, taken since that morning—Ross is at 20k, while Pistol tops 30k.
Rosie comes out of makeup looking like a space pixie, all pig tails and iridescent purple fishnets with white vinyl moon boots, petite and packing some heat. She’d been rehearsing a short dialogue with leading man Van Wylde, set in an alley. In the scene, Wylde gets jumped by one of the rebel stunt extras. As the actors throw fake blows, Rosie pulls out her gun and pops one off, cool and calm, putting an end to the faux fistfight. When she pulls the trigger, the stuntman drops to a thick mat on the floor. They practice this half a dozen times.
“I'm so honored to be here on this amazing set with Ricky Greenwood for Digital Playground,” Rosie revealed. “It's my first-ever feature, first-ever Digital Playground opportunity and I am just so overjoyed to be a part of it.”
“I'm Bomber, the young and upcoming fighter, and Abigaiil plays Kansas, who is the strongest and very famous Number One top fighter. So, I'm kind of under her wing. She's my mentor, but I'm also playing—I have this character development where I'm torn between the big evil people and what's right.”
She also appears in a sex scene with veteran performer Mick Blue, which was shot in a downtown high-rise, the location for the elite’s headquarters. “I got to do an amazing anal sex scene with Mick Blue, who plays Gordon, the head evil guy. So, it was amazing and I cannot wait for everyone to see what crazy, crazy fun sex we had.”
“Today, I'm going to be on all sorts of adventures with my tracker Cora, who Lil Puck plays, and with Bruce [Wylde’s character]. We're going to have some fight scenes. Then, I have a fight scene with Kansas.
“Just a bunch of adventuring, leading up to where I do end up getting fucked in the ass,” Rosie said, summarizing her character arc.
The stunts are being coordinated by adult performer-stuntman Nathan Bronson. His soon-to-be fiancé and frequent co-star Kendra James is playing a rebel, in a burlap riot bunny mask, black bikini briefs and army boots.
“I think it's my eighth or ninth movie for Ricky, doing stunt coordinating—it's like probably eleventh or twelfth in a porno,” Bronson says. In charge of training the adult actors to perform light stunts, he saves the more complicated choreography for the pro stuntpeople. He also supervises weaponry which, though the weapons are just props, still must be handled with care—like to make sure no weapons are displayed in any sex scenes, which is a no-no in adult movies.
Bronson starts blocking a scene where a rifle-toting stuntman will get caught in a rope snare by the ankle and dangle in the air for a moment, before Puck walks up, says a line, grabs him by the hair and delivers a fatal slice with a rubber blade. They practice the rope trick a few times with the stuntman hoisted in the air, arms flailing, before Bronson shows Puck how to cut the guy’s throat convincingly and also at the best angle for the camera. Wylde is in that scene, too.
A mixed martial artist, Wylde feels comfortable in the action hero role. As the blue-eyed, blonde-haired rebel leader, he plays the good guy this time. He’s been learning from Bronson how to pull punches and still look authentic on-camera. “My whole thing is if I'm throwing something, I don't know how to stop it. So, having them kind of show you that was pretty cool, because it's like I’m going full-in. It's like light sparring but you have muscle memory and so it's that reflex.”
“I guess tonight is going to be finishing up some scenes,” Wylde adds, lauding the crews’ efforts. “I think we're going to bang it out. This crew's solid. Everybody here, PAs, makeup artists, I've known them for years. They're all so nice. Everybody's a veteran—veteran people that know what they're doing, which it makes everything run smoother. The worst is when you're on a set and you're sitting there.
“This set, you're moving,” he said. “That's what you want to be a part of.”
Wylde mentions that he’s also in a scene that pairs Morris and Puck for the first time onscreen. Puck says she loves being a studio star after earning her performing chops as a consummate cosplayer, content creator and cam star before arriving on professional sets. Her character Cora is a real femme fatale, in thick, black eyeliner and pushed-up cleavage.
“I was mostly solo for, like, a fucking decade,” she says. “So, now I'm having amazing sex with all these incredible, really cool people and it's so nice. It's so great. When I show up to set, I'm not having to think about lighting and sound and the directing. I just get to act and perform. So, that's really, really nice.”
Outside in the yard, crew is trying to figure out how to place the charges for two small explosions that will be used during a short foot chase sequence. A line of folding chairs are set up in the shade, behind a camera, where Greenwood can sit with his German Shepard and watch the playback. The dog isn’t fazed by any of it.
Puck and Wylde do a live practice run with a couple of the masked rebels. Bronson calls “action,” and the actors sprint down the trail, dodging the explosions and powdery billows of smoke. Puck is dressed in a slinky, cement-colored dress with high slits and knee-high fur boots with kitten heels.
Thompson, who is seated in the shade, comments that Puck’s boobs look great, bouncing as she runs in the weeds. Rosie and Ross agree. Greenwood notes that it’s pretty close to 4th of July and he hopes no one calls the cops about the explosions.
The Tribunal is scheduled for release in September. The cast features Morris, Thompson, Puck, Rosie, Wylde, Blue, Charles Dera and Jimmy Bud.
Photography courtesy of Digital Playground