Jane Wilde: In It to Win It

This is the March 2022 cover story of AVN magazine. Click here for the digital edition. LOS ANGELES—Like you might expect to see adorning the apartment walls of any typical early-20s Los Angelino, there’s a piece of instantly identifiable movie kitsch hanging in Jane Wilde’s living room: an arrangement of four squares depicting the silhouettes of John Travolta and Uma Thurman from their iconic Jack Rabbit Slim’s dance-off in Pulp Fiction.  Despite her resigned quip that “I don’t know what I want to put up in my apartment,” her choice of this piece in particular resonates with perhaps a little more significance than one might register at first glance ... in fact, it could be argued that Jane’s entire career approach—her inner driving mantra that’s propelled her as far as she’s gotten since her porn debut now five years ago—is captured in the classic line Thurman’s Mia Wallace utters to Travolta’s Vincent Vega right before the two of them hit that stage: “I wanna dance, I wanna win, I want that trophy.” Jane now has three AVN trophies to her name thanks to that persistent drive of hers, the third—for Best Trans Group Sex Scene—coming at this year’s AVN Awards Show, in laudation of her climactic no-holds-barred thrasher with 2021’s AVN Transgender Performer of the Year and Male Performer of the Year, Aubrey Kate and Small Hands, in Joanna Angel’s supernatural drama Succubus (which just arrived on DVD, incidentally, should any DVD loyalists care to check it out). Naturally, Ms. Wilde is anything but content to sit back and lavish in the spoils of her endeavors; no, her fuse is barely yet lit, she says, and the coming year has things in store that will push her horizons in ways people may not be expecting. In particular, she divulges, she’s working on an autobiographical project about her beginnings in adult work, which had darker underpinnings than she revealed in her newbie days (though she did delve into them during a 2019 appearance on director/photographer Holly Randall’s “Unfiltered” podcast). “I want people to see it from my perspective, what happened,” she explains. “I was working at a clothing store right after I graduated high school, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but I wasn’t going to college and I didn’t want to work. I was lazy. So I went online and I was looking for jobs that I could do from home, and I found an ad on a website looking for webcam models—I didn’t know what that was. So I answered the ad just to see, because they said, like, ‘Make a thousand dollars a week,’ I was like, ‘That’s a lot of money,’ so I reached out, and then long story short, that ended up with me being in a situation that was kind of inescapable for about a year.” The situation in question, she elaborates, involved her being “manipulated by a man much older than me, and although I was technically a legal adult, I don’t feel like I had the maturity level to understand that I was being manipulated. I thought he was helping me. “People who groom have a very specific way of doing it,” she continues. “They kind of, like, wrap themselves all into your world while not letting you in their world at all. So they have all the power.” During that year, she says, “I learned a lot, I grew a lot, and I felt like when that whole situation ended, I had a decision ... I can either abandon sex work and just say I failed, I wasn’t able to do it, and just have this fear for the rest of my life that it’s gonna affect me negatively—because that’s what everyone says, right? That’s the stigma, ‘Oh, you can’t have a real job now.’ But then I was like, ‘Do I even want a real job? I don’t know what I want.’ “But I did feel like, I’m already in the sex industry, so I could either abandon it and leave, or I could try something else and see if that works. And luckily ... thankfully ... it worked.” That “something else,” of course, was traditional studio porn, and in the grand scheme of things, it’s little surprise Jane took to it like a proverbial fish to water, seeing as how, as she recalls, “I wanted to be a movie star since I was very young, and I wanted to impress people. I think that’s something that’s always been a part of me, is this feeling like I just want to impress people and make people entertained.” In high school, she says, that manifested itself in the forms of both a deep interest in writing and heavy involvement with her school’s drama program, two things she’s now carried into her chosen profession. In the case of the latter, what she picked up no doubt played a part in helping her land the two AVN acting nominations she’s received—first for Supporting Actress in 2019’s Better Things to Do from Digital Playground, and then for Leading Actress this year in Succubus—and on the former count, she’s tapped her writerly side in a pair of instances as well: with the 2018 Pure Taboo featurette Cutting the Cord: A Jane Wilde Story, and with the current untitled project she’s developing about her entrée into porn. “I’ve always loved writing ever since I was young,” she reflects. “I always enjoyed making up stories or characters, and that’s why I really like TV and movies. I almost went to college majoring in a screenwriting type program. It’s just always something that I have enjoyed and something I’m always gonna enjoy, even if I don’t write for like months at a time because I don’t have the motivation. It’s a nice creative outlet and it’s been something that I’ve been wanting to explore a little bit.” With regard to the current project, she reservedly offers, “I’ve been working on it, and I’m trying to take my time with it because obviously I want it to be really good, and I want it to be accurate. And it’s a lot of pressure, because when you’re telling your own story, it’s like you don’t want people to misunderstand you or misconstrue the truth. So I’m trying to just take it slow and build up my confidence in myself and writing, and just reassuring myself that there’s people that want to hear my story and hear what I have to say.” She adds, “I want to tell a story—my story—but a story that ends with someone entering the porn industry and being happy, and not that being their demise and what ruins their life, because I know that there’s a lot of people that are like me, that porn has saved their life, and porn has given them direction in their life and given them something to live for and something to be excited about and the freedom to do what they want in their life. “There are positive stories, and they deserve to be told as well; stories that end with positivity and happiness that end in porn. So I want to tell a story like that and I’m gonna do my best and I am really excited for people to see that.” As all indications would suggest, Jane professes that “eventually one day I would love to produce my own feature—cast everyone, write everything myself. But I know it’s daunting, like it’s not something that should be taken lightly, and it’s not something that I feel ready to do completely on my own for a while. I don’t know when I will, or if I ever will. But I’m not waiting for those types of things, I’m just going with whatever feels good for right now.” That said, there is one thing—to hark back to that immortal line from Pulp Fiction—upon which Jane Wilde has her eyes set resolutely and unwaveringly: “I will win Performer of the Year before I die. “Once that happens—if that happens—I will be so proud of myself. I’m already proud of myself, but I feel like that’s just the pinnacle of, like, you did everything right. “Because I said when I got in this industry, I want to be a star, I want to be famous, I want to be like a legend in the industry. And I feel like winning that award kind of solidifies that. So yeah, that’s what I want.”   Photos by Miranda Harrison (IG: @mirandaharrison)