Interview: Looking into Olive Glass

Age: 27 | 5-foot-7 | 120 pounds | 32C-26-32 | Hair: Black | Eyes: Hazel It takes only a few minutes of talking with Olive Glass before it becomes obvious that this raven-haired beauty has enough brain power and drive to succeed at anything she puts her mind to—and thankfully for us, her current choice is porn. "The best thing about porn is the emotional empowerment and fulfillment I get through celebrating my sexuality," she said. "I think about that a lot; I think about everything probably too much but I grew up in a really religious, pretty suppressive environment as a kid and we weren't allowed to explore—not that you want kids exploring their sexuality, but I was definitely told growing up that women marry the first person they sleep with, they have children, they stay at home—it was pretty fundamentalist. I come from something more along the lines of FLDS; Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints. LDS broke off into the FLDS that went one direction in the state, and then my family started a community on the border of Nevada and Utah of their own branch of fundamentalist Mormon, and I grew up on a very small homestead out in the desert." But Olive (not her real name) chafed under her restrictions, and even invented an imaginary friend, "Olive," who "looked just like me but she did all the bad stuff. My mom would be, 'Oh, what did you do that for?' And I was like, 'No, Olive did it. I didn't do it; Olive did it.' As a child, I thought it worked every time, but it didn't really work out too well." Life under Mormonism, however, was not for her. "I was never really into that; that was never my style, so I guess my philosophy is, I'm curious about life and I want to explore all the different facets of it, and I think especially in the political climate going on right now, it's really important for women like myself, who love our sexuality, to take almost like an educational standpoint. But also at the same time, I'm making porn where I obviously am enjoying myself, and I think people need to see women enjoying themselves and being highly sexual at the same time. So that's where I'm coming from." So ... having sex on camera is a political act? "It is," she agreed. "I wanted to pursue porn for a long time and I never really dove into it until Trump got elected, and I was like, 'I guess now is the time and place,' right? I think that there is a lot of power behind sexuality." Of course, it's not as if Olive doesn't bring a wealth of mainstream experience to her adult career. She spent seven years as a mainstream model, often designing her own layouts, and actress, often styling her own wardrobe, mainly based in New York City but in fact, she had gigs around the world until ... "I guess I got kind of uninspired by it all," she sighed, "and I felt like the porn industry had more of the edge I was looking for from an artist's standpoint as well as I just felt really accepted and it was a fun, wonderful, well-paying environment, so here I am. "After about my fourth or fifth year in mainstream, I was like, 'I'm going to start being the boss around here too,’” she added, "so I started playing with different concepts, and it seemed like the people I was working around—amazing artists; don't get me wrong, but I felt like there was always that block of, they never wanted to delve too deeply or go too far, and the porn industry doesn't have that same block. The walls are coming down. I feel a lot more inspired in this industry at this point, and I was really excited to make some really cool stuff. I eventually want to start directing." And Olive's had a chance to observe some of the better ones. She appears in Brad Armstrong's Spoiled and Axel Braun's Busted (both from Wicked Pictures), not to mention Dan O'Connell's Lesbian Legal 12 (Girlfriends) and Mike Quasar's Lesbian Sex Therapist 2 (Addicted 2 Girls), plus she's done a bunch of scenes for YanksVR.com—good grounding for a genre that may well be the future of porn. Her favorite, though, she says, was one of her first upon moving to L.A.: Couples Retreat for Digital Playground, where she got to share orgasms with hot couple Mia Malkova and Danny Mountain—but what she'd really like to do is "a really elaborate feature with Andrew Blake; something visually rich." "I don't know how I keep getting so lucky to be cast in these amazing scenes and features," she said, "but I keep finding all these new directors that I'm like, 'Ohmigod, I would have wanted to work with you had I not, but I'm here now.'" But even the adult industry can't contain this immense personality, so Olive has plenty of other ways to feed her creativity and curiosity. For example, she'll be dog-sledding across Norway this winter, talking photographs all along the way, which she expects to make into a book when she gets back. "I've got a few different cameras, film and digital, that I'll be taking," she said. "It'll be in February, it'll be dark and there'll be the northern lights all day long, and it'll be cool." Olive is also a painter, mostly using acrylics on glass—and she even had a part-time business doing that for retailers when she lived in New York. "I have a goal set for myself to do one new thing a month," she revealed, "and so, this month, I'm going and taking tango lessons a little bit south of here. I have two tango lessons lined up, and last year, I went to Scotland for my birthday and stayed there by myself in a castle, and then I did a hot-air balloon ride—it all has to be by myself, like solo missions." In her free time, Olive curls up with her 10-year-old black cat, Shiva. "She's a little bit of a monster to everybody but me but she loves me so I don't care." With a "live for the moment" philosophy, Olive hasn't made plans for her life after porn. "I never finished high school, but I got my GED," she said. "I think that when I'm like in my 40s, I'll be interested in going to college, but honestly, I don't see the point right now. I mean, I'm learning so much, I decided I really don't need school right now; I should like go out and pursue my dreams, and once I know what I want to do, then I spend the money on college, not the other way around, because college is expensive, and it's a lot of time spent in white rooms with—I don't know; I don't think I'd like that." It's a philosophy that we suspect is shared by a number of her porn compatriots—and porn viewers are the happier for it! Book Olive Glass through ATMLA. Follow her on Twitter: @Olive_Glass_. Photo by Jeff Koga/@KogaFoto