Ex-Disney Star Bella Thorne, 21, Announces Porn Debut—as Director

HOLLYWOOD—Bella Thorne, the 21-year-old former child actress and star of the Disney Channel series Shake It Up that ran from 2010 to 2013, has directed her first movie, and it’s an adult video that will debut on Pornhub next month after a big-screen premiere at Germany’s Oldenburg Film Festival. That Thorne would tackle a sexually explicit production as her directorial debut may not be entirely surprising. Since her Disney Channel days, Thorne has not shied away from controversial revelations, coming out as bisexual three years ago, and earlier this year, disclosing that she had suffered repeated incidences of sexual abuse since she started as a professional child model at the age of six.  Thorne’s new project, being released as part of Pornhub's "Visionary Director's Club" series, is titled Her & Him and stars porn performers Small Hands in the “Him” role and Abella Danger as “Her.” Thorne discussed the featurette in a YouTube promotional video released on Tuesday and posted below. "What inspired me to do the movie was basically thinking about this relationship between a male and a female and this fight over dominance and how much that relates to us in our general world besides in a sexual scenario," Thorne explains in the YouTube interview. Thorne says she cast Abella Danger and Small Hands in the title roles because she believed that they had the ability to “switch between being dominant and submissive,” as the project’s storyline requires, according to a report by the entertainment site Complex.  Though Thorne has long ago left behind her Disney Channel persona, she said that the experience of shooting an adult video was a new one. “The process of shooting was quite interesting because we had real life fucking on set, which I had never shot before at all," Thorne says in the promotional video. “It is quite a fun environment." Thorne also defends porn as a valid storytelling genre in the interview.  "If you think that porn is uncomfortable, I’m sorry that you are uncomfortable," Thorne says. "But don’t make other people feel uncomfortable for being okay with it." View the full interview here: Photo By Maryam Keshavarzi / Wikimedia Commons