'Boy Meets World' star Maitland Ward says it's time for 'porn to be mainstream' and is happy with career switch
Maitland Ward who played Rachel McGuire on the ABC/Disney Channel comedy 'Boy Meets World' 22 years ago has now switched to adult entertainment. The 43-year-old launched her OnlyFans page last August and made a jump from 8,000 paying customers at the beginning of 2020 to 15,000 in mid-April courtesy the pandemic that has given her business a boost.
Ward has hosted karaoke parties, video sessions with other adult entertainers, sexy cooking sessions, and even a "corona dance party" and relayed it from her shower. In interviews with various outlets, she explained that porn is not very different from Hollywood and that she's proud of where she's at from a career standpoint as she's making more money than she ever did.
In an interview with The Ringer, she explained that her goal is to help fans take their minds off of the stress of the quarantine while keeping it sexy. Ward says she has hosted live stream karaoke parties, video sessions with other adult entertainers, sexy cooking sessions, and a "corona dance party" where she showed people how to wash their hands by washing her body, in her shower. "There's a human on the other end of it that’s reacting to you, and back and forth, so it’s actually comforting to talk to everybody," she said. 'It’s just very communal."
The coronavirus has affected the porn industry as much as any other but Ward has still managed to make money by offering exclusive content to her subscribers across platforms. She also told The Ringer that the option of premium social media accounts on various sites is a "game-changer" for adult performers. "Before camming and before OnlyFans and stuff, they didn’t have an outlet. It’s just put so much control in the hands of the performers."
Ward explained that porn and mainstream Hollywood have a lot of similarities than differences. "Porn sets are run much like mainstream. The same lights. The same cameras. Just different actions. People will ask me if I fear that the adult industry has ruined me for mainstream. It's quite the opposite. Mainstream ruined me for mainstream. It became limiting and I was bored."
Expressing similar views in a 2019 interview with InTouch while also referring to her erotic thriller movie 'Drive', she said, "I never knew there was anything in adults or porn or whatever that was this well done. I read the script, and I was like, 'This is really, really well-written.' This has so many themes in this and just my character is so different than anything I have portrayed before." Ward received two nominations at AVN Awards (popularly known as the Oscars of Porn) for her role of an innocent woman coming out of her shell in the movie.
"I won six awards at XBIZ and AVN—not only for the acting but also the sex," Ward wrote in her article for Daily Beast. She is still a month shy of completing one year in the adult entertainment industry however she's already considered as an A-list artiste in the industry. She hopes that her presence in the industry could help in porn being considered as an art form as well as bridge the gap between porn and mainstream. "I'm playing roles that I want to play. I can be dark and twisted and sexual. I'm afforded the freedom to find my voice, and that isn't something mainstream often allows you to do. I have porn to thank for that. It's time for porn to be mainstream and mainstream to accept porn," Ward added.