After Big Wins, Angela White Focuses on Gratitude and Giving Back

This feature is the cover story of the May 2019 issue of AVN Magazine. Click here for the full digital edition. LOS ANGELES—In the hours after Angela White cemented her place in porn history on January 26th, she sipped champagne, called Rocco Siffredi and ate pizza.  Even though White doesn’t really drink, the night of the 2019 AVN Awards Show turned into just that kind of occasion for the Australian star. “And if you know me—it’s very rare for me to let my hair down,” White admits. The native of Sydney, Australia, enjoyed some bubbly with Team Evil Angel—the legendary studio she aligned with for her second straight victory for Best Star Showcase—after another triumphant evening at The Joint inside Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, where the humble Spiegler Girl collected 10 AVN Awards to go with the 14 she won in 2018, giving her a record 24 in the past two years and 30 overall.  Her armful of 2019 hardware included her second consecutive AVN Female Performer of the Year trophy, making her only the second woman in history to win it back-to-back. “Then we all went down to Mr. Lucky’s and had pizza, which is another very rare celebratory occasion for me,” White jokes, adding she was still wearing her spectacular red Alexandre Vauthier evening gown, while sitting at the 24-hour diner in the casino lobby. “And then later—about a week after that—we all went out for another celebratory dinner. We were definitely very, very happy with how the night turned out.” White figured out her final awards tally while in the Trophy Room inside Vinyl nightclub after the show. Her glorious haul also included gold statuettes for Best Oral Sex Scene for her eight-man blow-bang in Angela by Darkko (AGW/Darkko/Evil Angel); Best Group Sex Scene for After Dark (Vixen/Jules Jordan); Best Actress - Featurette for “Who’s Becky?” from Games We Play (Trenchcoatx/Jules Jordan); and Best Anal Sex Scene for her electric hook-up with Rocco Siffredi in I Am Angela from Evil Angel Films.  It was in the Trophy Room—which has become a not-so-secret hot spot to see porn’s finest in celebratory mode—that she caught up to the Italian superstar, who couldn’t make it to this year’s ceremony due to shoulder surgery.  “Yeah it was great. [Evil Angel founder] John [Stagliano] and I were trying to FaceTime him, but I guess it was a little too early for him so he called back a little bit later, while we were still in the Trophy Room and it was just really exciting to talk to him on such an exciting night,” White says. “To congratulate him while being around everyone in there celebrating with their trophies.” White also captured fan-voted awards for Favorite Female Porn Star and Most Spectacular Boobs; and her studio AGW Entertainment won Best All-Girl Movie for Angela Loves Women 4—a title that was distributed by Girlfriends Films; all three marked additional back-to-back honors, underscoring her unprecedented level of industry domination during the 24-month span. “It’s very exciting as well because that series has won multiple times,” White says. “I think that Volume 1, Volume 3 and Volume 4 all won Best All-Girl Movie for AVN. That’s obviously a very popular series that I’m going to work on this year as well.” White’s historic night came on Australia Day—the equivalent of July 4th in the Land Down Under—when she matched Tori Black as the only other performer to win the top award for a female performer back-to-back. Even one of the security guards in White’s apartment building recently declared their most famous tenant, “The Michael Jordan of Porn.” No argument here. “I feel incredible,” White says. “It’s sinking in… To be honest I was still trying to let the previous year’s wins sink in because that was just out of this world.  “So I was able to enjoy and celebrate this year’s wins a lot more because last year I was distracted by the responsibility of hosting [the 2018 AVN Awards Show]. I knew I couldn’t let my guard down too much because I knew I needed to get back on that stage and bring on the next presenters. So this year I definitely took in the experience a lot more.”  She continues, “As I said backstage it was very special for me to get to walk from the crowd up to the stage because I’ve never experienced that in my career. I don’t know if that would seem like a silly thing to someone else but it was something that meant something to me.” White’s win for the ambitious star showcase, I Am Angela, produced by John Stagliano and directed by Evil Chris—who won his first Best Director-Non Feature award—was especially gratifying, given all that went into the pre- and post-production.  The docu-porn project—which became profitable for Evil Angel in only 10 days on the market and needed just six weeks to become the studio’s best-selling release of 2018—featured four scenes each shot by an AVN Hall of Fame member—Jonni Darkko, Dana Vespoli, Joey Silvera and Stagliano. “Everything was a challenge—to bring together that many directors and that many performers,” says Shawn, who is White’s longtime production manager and photographer. “It’s not a normal movie; it was super difficult to do.” White did a 3-on-1 with 2018 AVN Male Performer of the Year Markus Dupree, three-time AVN Male Performer of the Year Mick Blue, and veteran performer Steve Holmes that was powered by rounds of double vaginal, double anal and triple penetration—and was directed by Darkko; she tangled with alt-porn princess Joanna Angel in an all-girl anal excursion that Vespoli directed and also performed in; and in the third episode, White did the horizontal mamba with 2019 Transsexual Performer of the Year Chanel Santini—her first scene with a trans performer—that was directed by the trans porn pioneer Silvera, who lensed his first adult film in 1975. The fourth scene was White’s first with the incomparable Rocco Siffredi—arguably the most famous living porn star. In a move unheard of in porn, Siffredi flew 6200-plus miles from his estate in Budapest, Hungary, for one momentous anal scene with White, while his mentor of nearly 30 years, Stagliano, called the shots. “It’s really special that that movie received so much acclaim because that was a really big mission,” says White, who contributed a five-figure sum of her own money to the production. “That was a lot of moving parts, a lot of people collaborating, contributing. It’s hard enough to just organize a showcase movie with one director. But to have collaborations with Jonni Darkko, and Dana Vespoli and Joey Silvera is a real feat—and then John Stagliano himself.  “It was quite a feat and it was incredible to have so many amazing people working together on one project. And then to have Rocco fly across the world for that scene was an incredible honor and I’m just so grateful that I got the opportunity to do a scene with him, let alone a scene that was so powerful and incredible. And we are in talks of trying to do something else together this year.” To say the demand for White’s services is high on the heels of the 36th AVN Awards ceremony would be a vast understatement. White at press time had either already received formal offers or was in talks for potential 2019 projects with sought-after producers such as Greg Lansky, Bree Mills, Marc Dorcel, Digital Playground, Darkko, Stagliano and Siffredi for starters. It looks like the biggest problem White faces this year is figuring out what she can squeeze onto her dance card. “It’s a wonderful problem,” she says. “I’m definitely grateful for that problem.” But White didn’t get where she is today by assuming anything was going to happen. She did it the old fashioned way.  “I never count my chickens before they’re hatched,” White continues. “I’m always very loathe to get too excited about things until things are officially in the works and things are booked and I’m there and it’s happening. I often don’t even get excited until the scenes are in the bag and they start to be edited. “Because I know that the production can go wrong, will go wrong. So I never really announce anything until I know it’s going to really happen. But we are organizing next week to have a Skype call with Rocco—John and I—so I’m really hoping that we can do something really exciting.”  White mounted her remarkable 2018 campaign with a diverse series of high-profile collaborations. Aside from her stellar showcases with Stagliano and Darkko, she also wrote and starred in an emotional episode for Pure Taboo about body shaming that was co-directed by Bree Mills and Craven Moorehead; and she penned and starred in a tender vignette for Greg Lansky’s Vixen opposite the now six-time AVN Male Performer of the Year Manuel Ferrara.  During the 2019 AVN Awards eligibility period, White performed in 155 sex scenes and appeared in 74 DVD releases—not including compilations—landing an industry-leading 40 box covers. She headlined more than 15 releases in September 2018 alone. At press time in mid-March, White had completed a record 37th straight week as the “Most Popular” adult performer on leading one-stop platform, Adult Empire. The weekly ranking—found in the AE Pulse section of the site’s blog—is based on DVD and streaming sales, search inquiries and fan requests. White tells AVN she has no plans to downshift in 2019. “I’d really love to do more collaborations this year,” White says. “I really felt like the collaborations that I was able to do last year helped me grow a lot. I think working closely with other people really helps you be more creative, helps you look at things with a different perspective and I feel like probably the best work that I did was when I was collaborating with others. So that’s definitely something that I want to continue. “There’s only so much you can do on your own and I feel like you better yourself and possibly other people when you help each other—and that’s definitely something I want to continue. And I want to continue creating work that’s meaningful to me, that’s hopefully impactful and that’s more inclusive. I always feel like when you can grow as a performer, director and producer that your work improves.” White brought the same level of thoughtfulness to her AVN cover shoot with photographer Keith Ryan in February. She wore lingerie sets that each were part of important career moments she had in the past two years—not to mention her 2019 AVN Awards gown. She slipped into her nude lingerie set for the box cover of Angela Volume 3; and for her 2018 winning Best Boy/Girl Scene with Manuel Ferrara that was her first creampie.   White’s sheer blue lingerie set is the same one she had on for her anal scene with Markus Dupree in Angela Loves Anal Volume 2; she sported her black pants suit briefly in I Am Angela and the black lingerie underneath it was the same set she chose for her encounter with Rocco. In another AVN photoset, White added a garter belt to that black ensemble. Then in the only cover-shoot look that fans have yet to see, White was ravishing in a fetish-inspired, black lingerie set that she planned to unveil for her scene with two-time AVN Transsexual Performer of the Year Aubrey Kate on March 2—her second with a trans performer. It’s rare when the hardest working woman in porn takes an extended break, but at press time White was planning a March-to-April getaway to Australia to attend her younger brother’s wedding. “I’m the eldest. He is like four years younger than me. I’m going to take three weeks,” she says. “I’m going to go to his wedding and then I have other things to sort out in Australia. … It will be the first time I’ve really seen my whole family in three years. Because my mom and sister did fly over to see me last year, but aside from that…” White reveals she brought her younger sister to the Evil Angel offices during the editing process of I Am Angela. “She helped with the editing. She was obsessed with the whole Rocco—she thought it was the best thing ever,” White explains. “She was a little guinea pig because we hadn’t really shown anyone outside of porn any of the documentary segments; and while it might be interesting to people in porn, if you don’t know the characters maybe you lose things. Maybe you don’t understand who is this, why is this important? But she watched it and she’s not in the industry or anything. She knows about it through me but she’s not an expert at it. … But watching the documentary segment she was enthralled the entire time. Like, ‘OK, yeah, this is great.’  “We were asking her, ‘OK, does this make sense? Do you understand who this person is based on what we’ve shown or do we need to fill in some gaps?’ And she just helped us with that. She gave some very good feedback. But most of it she got straightaway and thought it was interesting.” She says Evil Chris is working on making I Am Angela into a feature-length documentary for mainstream audiences with sights set on the film festival circuit. “So he needs to shoot a lot more footage for that,” White adds. “That’s very exciting.” White calls her stardom “wonderful and surreal.” She was the top draw at the AVN Show in Vegas—wherever she went—whether it was the Evil Angel booth in The Joint or Greg Lansky or Jules Jordan’s booth’s in Muse Hall, she had the biggest lines at the convention. “I’m incredibly grateful to the fans because I really appreciate what they do to get there at the show,” White, who remains one of the most down-to-earth performers in the business, says. “A lot of people are traveling interstate—some overseas—just to get a chance to meet me and the other performers, so they’re taking their time and they’re spending their money to meet me and I don’t take that for granted.  “And that’s why I like to spend as much time as a I can with each person. I don’t just want to sign a card and send them off because they’ve really taken the time to come to see me. “So I want to take my time to give back to them. And it’s those fans, those true supporters that buy our work, that makes what we do possible. So I am very grateful to the fans for everything they do.” White continues, “And also I started off in this industry for the purposes of self exploration. But when I hear stories from fans about the way that I’ve touched them, about the ways that I’ve helped them embrace their sexuality, about the ways that they’ve been able to open up more to their partners, that makes my work even more meaningful and powerful because it becomes bigger than just about me and my own exploration. It becomes about others and helping others with their sexual exploration. So that’s really important to me. “For me I feel like Female Performer of the Year obviously is a representation of the work that I’ve done in the previous year and it’s a privilege and an honor. But it’s also a responsibility. So I do want to do my best to represent the industry in a positive light and to create work that is meaningful to others.” Photography by Keith Ryan