Bowing Out: Tyler Knight on 'Going Up,' Career & Retirement

LOS ANGELES—Tyler Knight admits that at first he had no interest in playing one of the lead characters in Going Up. The veteran star remembers receiving the call from co-producer Eli Cross in January, offering him the pivotal role of Shaun Booker, the talented yet volatile director of a controversial play that becomes riddled with problems as showtime nears. It’s what Shaun and his cast and crew do to deal with those issues that drives the narrative of Going Up, the ambitious feature from Lust Cinema that was directed by Casey Calvert.  “I’ll just be direct and tell you I flat out didn’t want to do it,” Knight says. “So instead of asking for an egregious sum of money and having to take it once it’s offered, I put an actual speed bump in there. I told him if I did it, there’s no way I’m performing and I thought it would kind of discourage them. “The way it worked out, I was still No. 1 on the call sheet but I didn’t perform. [Seth Gamble] was the lead actor.” Still, Knight delivered in what may have been the finest acting performance of his 20-year career, earning a 2023 AVN Award nomination for Best Non-Sex Performance for his efforts. The elaborate production racked up 11 AVN nominations in all, including Grand Reel and Outstanding Directing - Individual Work for Calvert, for the 40th annual AVN Awards ceremony on Jan. 7 in Las Vegas. Knight in November told AVN he would be bowing out with Going Up, revealing that he is retiring from being on camera after more than a thousand adult credits and two AVN Awards—Best Anal Sex Scene with Chelsie Rae for Wicked Pictures’ The Craving in 2008; and an induction into the AVN Hall of Fame in 2021. The 51-year-old native of Philadelphia says there were a number of reasons why he chose to be in Going Up in a non-sex capacity, even though there was a sex scene for his character in the original script. For starters, he had stepped away from performing when the pandemic started and did not have the appetite for starting again. “Getting infected and then getting sick and dying wasn’t a risk I wanted to take,” Knight says. “I have a compromised immune system… “And I got married during the pandemic in a small civil ceremony and my priorities in life shifted dramatically.” Knight says he and co-producer Eli Cross have known each other for more than 15 years—he considers him a friend—and in recent years they have stayed in touch via texting every few months. “Which is the best version of me being in touch with people possible,” Tyler said in November. “Up until two months ago I socialized zero times over the past couple of years. He reached out to me for another project, some film that took place in a cabin out in Big Bear and I politely declined. So I figured what the hell…” In fact, Knight says he lost track of the number of projects he declined in the past two-and-a-half years. He tells AVN he did miss seeing a few people on set—and some of the camaraderie with fellow performers and crew that had enriched hundreds of his experiences under the lights, but he didn’t miss it that much. “No offense to [Eli] and Casey, but nostalgia is pretty much a lie,” Knight says. “It’s an idealized version of the past that never existed.” So when it came time to being hot-headed Shaun Booker for two weeks, Knight was all business to say the least. The demands of the role tested his resolve—a less experienced actor may have folded under the pressure. “Look, it would’ve been OK if it would’ve been a day or two on the set. Of the 15 days of production, I was on set 10 or 11 days out of the 15. It’s long days making a feature—a feature not to the extent they used to make. … I just didn’t miss it at all,” Knight says. He tells AVN that reading the outline of what the script would be inspired his confidence in the project, solidifying his decision to take on the project. “They were still kind of working on it,” Knight explains. “I got the sense I wasn’t the first choice—whatever, it is what it is. I read the outline and liked the thought they put into the character, the detail. “A story is character and character is story; they’re inextricable. And that was pretty well fleshed out in the outline, so that was kind of the tipping point.” What no one else knew at the time was that Knight embarked on Going Up knowing he would have to overcome increasing challenges with his vision. Knight says he is “not so subtlety” losing his eyesight because of macular degeneration and possibly something in his brain that is affecting it, though doctors have yet to pinpoint what that would be. “I’m going blind and that’s not hyperbole,” he says. “So just getting my lines off was pretty much the most difficult challenge.” That changed Knight’s preparation, forcing him to carefully consider how he was going to approach each scene before he got to the set. “Well before production even started or I stepped onto set I had two or three choices of how I wanted to take my character every single scene,” Knight explains. “Everything from asking the director, what do I do with my hands? I didn’t have the luxury of looking at the lines. I had to be off book and have a fully fleshed-out performance before I stepped on the set.” He explains there was one time he was on the Going Up set when things just about went “dark” on him. “I was kind of waiting in the house—in the seats, basically—and my eye-sight changed and dropped like an elevator cable cut in free fall,” he continues. “I was pretty challenged. I literally couldn’t even see my co-stars. Ninety-percent of acting is listening and watching what’s going on around you, especially your co-stars. The overwhelming majority of human communication is non-verbal and I was robbed of that. I had to guess what the target was. “I pulled Casey and [Eli] aside and I told them but none of my co-stars were aware. I probably came off as a prima donna. I was pretty demanding not only of myself but of my co-stars, too. I kind of lost my cool and screamed at someone. I pulled a Christian Bale when they were walking across the set while we were rehearsing a really big scene. Rehearsing is a critical part of the job. It’s the kingpin everything rests on.” Knight says he went from having 20/15 vision in both eyes in February 2021 to going to bed one night after editing content for YouTube and “I woke up like I was submerged under a moving stream.” “It was kind of foggy and then it got better, like a halo effect. Then it got worse again and better. It was a two steps back, one step forward kind of thing.” He was given two options for treatment. “Stab eyeballs every five to six weeks to drain fluid or three minutes worth of laser beam shot in my eyes. That was the default choice,” Tyler says. “I’ve had 12 different prescriptions over the past year-and-a-half—pretty nuts and expensive.” But Knight is taking his condition in stride. “I’ve seen the world and accomplished most of what I’ve wanted to accomplish,” he says. “I wanted to be the first African American male to summit Mount Everest and come back down alive. “A woman beat everybody to it. I’ve done ultra marathons. … I can still write. Speech to text is actually a thing and text to speech is actually a thing…Both Word and Final Draft have speech to text and text to speech.” In Going Up, even though Knight’s Shaun is married he wants his stage manager Eliza Lindsay—played by Victoria Voxxx—adding another layer to both characters. “She was supposed to be my scene partner I was supposed to have sex with and the fact that I was adamant about not having sex in the film actually created tension between Shaun and Eliza—unresolved tension,” Knight says. “Had they had sex it would’ve burst that bubble and a dimension of both performances would’ve been lost.” Tyler says he came away impressed with how Seth Gamble handled himself as Travis Carmichael—the dishwasher and acting understudy who was thrust into the starring role of the play for opening night. Gamble and Knight shared some of the most dramatic scenes of the movie, including a couple shouting matches. “He takes his job very seriously. He’s not vamping throughout the process like a lot of leading guys are in this industry,” Knight says. “It’s actually refreshing. He was prepared. He worked hard and he’s able to take direction. It was a nice game of tennis. Acting is kind of a back and forth tennis type of thing.” Knight offered his interpretation on the unresolved ending of Going Up, when the play is about to start with Travis stepping up as the curtain is about to rise. “My interpretation is it would’ve absolutely failed because there’s no indication previously that he had the ability to do well,” Knight says. And if the play failed on opening night, how would Shaun react? “Suicide,” Knight says. “Shaun is pretty high strung. He’s an egotistical, narcissistic control freak. It doesn’t bode well. He definitely would have a meltdown…” *** Born in the City of the Brotherly Love, Knight jokes that “I spent my halcyon days in New Jersey.” Fresh out of high school, he ventured to Los Angeles for college, attending a private art school that no longer exists and enjoying the “palm trees and pretty girls.” He started out a Fine Art major, and then went deep into Fashion Design. With his proximity to the fashion industry, he soon became a male model, a pursuit in which which he thrived throughout the ’90s. Knight went most of the past two years without any active income, choosing to lay low during the pandemic. “I was very fortunate that I was able to not work for two years and make sure my family is taken care of,” he says. “I’ve been active investing in the market since the Dow was at 2000 in 2004. When I got licensed not even my girlfriends at the time and up to my wife knew how much money I had. “I’m fortunate to be in the position where I do not necessarily have to work through passive income—money you make when you click the mouse a few times.” In 2022, he had been earning a healthy sum working for a hedge fund for eight months despite still not needing to do it. But he wasn’t happy, so in December he quit. “Time is always more valuable than money,” Tyler says. He has performed in hundreds of scenes, including countless features, but he considers his greatest achievement what he stood for during his two decades in Porn Valley. “From the outset I wanted to make a conscious effort to try to portray African American men in the most positive way,” Knight says. “The business is inherently racist. It’s woven into the fabric of what the industry is. Kudos to AVN for getting rid of the interracial category, which incentivizes people to do the most outrageous and heinous things in the name of interracial product. “There’s opportunities I clearly did not get due to the fact that I’m a Black male.. … I made a solid effort after I saw behind the curtain of what the industry had in store to have as positive a light as possible of the image of the Black male in this industry.” He continues, “There are two or three things that I’m not proud of, like the gangbangs … I didn’t have the opportunity to say no. “I made a conscious point to not step on a set or do things that were demeaning or degrading. You have no idea what a film is going to be called… “I’ve met some champions who invited me to the table to create a product that I was just another character in the story who just happened to be Black. “Like [Eli], like [Axel Braun], Diana DeVoe. I have to say [Lexington Steele] was definitely a big influence and Sean Michaels were big influences on what could and couldn’t be done in this industry. “I tried to do my little bit—to expand, to open the door a little farther than it was opened for me.” Knight says that even before the pandemic he knew he was ending his career. “I didn’t want to to be a hanger on, so to speak,” he continues. “Even if I was working for better projects. I didn’t want to be on set just for the sake of being on set for frankly whatever rate people want to pay me. I would be losing money. … I’m making far more now than I ever did in my best year in the industry.” He adds, “If I didn’t feel like I could do my absolute best work unless of course I slammed Viagra every single scene or shoot my dick up with Caverject or take hormone replacement therapy. That’s the new normal. “I certainly wasn’t going to go down that route. It came to the point where I just didn’t want to perform and be good enough and be serviceable.” Knight in the fall was in talks with a prominent legacy studio about the possibility of directing. But knowing the standard to which he holds himself, he’s been contemplating whether he wants to commit to it. “I’d be the first one to admit if I can’t accomplish what I want to accomplish I don’t want to do it,” he says. It’s that kind of ambition and determination that has fueled him in mixed martial arts training and overall in a life filled with athletic achievement. He’s even completed ultra marathons, racing across deserts and mountains in the course of a single 100-mile race. “Thirty hours to go from starting line to the finish line,” he says. “It’s great, I fucking love it. You really get to learn who you are—from ecstasy and elation to despair—you experience the entire range of human emotions. “I’ve toed the starting line on six races.” He’s competed in two 50k races (30 or 32 miles) and four 100-mile marathons, finishing two of them—one of them in the top 10 and the other in the top 14. Knight in 2016 published his memoir Burn My Shadow: A Selective Memory of an X-Rated Life about his first 15 years in adult. He worked on the book for the better part of a decade. He also wrote a novel right before the pandemic, Deer Shoots Man: Then steals his cigarettes. “It is a science fiction novel about an African American fighting to a find a cure for a global pandemic that will eliminate more than half the world’s population against a backdrop of civil unrest and race riots, a toppled American government,” he says. “Then we got 2020 and January 6, 2021, and now my book is critically acclaimed.” The prolific writer also has been penning screenplays, placing high in several contests. He turned 51 in November, telling AVN, “It’s pretty scary saying you’re not going to be beholden to anyone else. Ultimately, life is short. I was happiest when I was struggling financially but doing what I wanted to do in life. “So I’m going to use my testicles and set forth and do things I want to do.” Tyler says he can step away feeling satisfied with his career. “I accomplished all I wanted to accomplish. If you step into the way back machine, I actually was a working actor—SAG, agented. The stuff I did was the handsome meat puppet, the himbo. Just stand there and look pretty, that kind of shit,” he says. “Every once in a while there is a part that allows you to sink your teeth in a little more.” His first adult movie gig was a non-sex role for Veronica Hart’s Barbara’s Broadcast Too for VCA Pictures—20 years ago last November. “I was a handsome dumb-ass for Chloe, their contract girl,” he recalls. “I was a waiter who came up to Chloe and her friend in a scene full of background extras. I’d never been naked in front of so many people.” As he looks back on his two decades of adult industry experiences, Knight says if he has one regret, it’s “isolation.” “I was on an island, not living in the Valley, not going to parties, going to AVN three times in 20 years. I was anti-social, aloof ... I wish I got to know some people deeper,” Tyler says. Without question, he got to know Eli Cross, which is why he called upon Knight to take on one of the meatiest adult roles of 2022. “It was something I could really sink my teeth into and I’m really happy with what I was able to accomplish,” Tyler says. “I was glad for the opportunity. It was a nice role, well crafted, well written. “Casey and [Eli] both have writing credits on it. You can tell when people have an understanding of character and story.” Knight adds, “I got in at the perfect time and I’m getting out at the perfect time. “I will miss some of the people if I don’t decide to direct. I’ll probably never see them again. If I do direct I will fill the set with people I love and care about or at least can tolerate.”