Wild & Free: The Rapid Rise of Angel Youngs

This is the February cover story of AVN magazine. Click here for the full digital issue. LOS ANGELES—Angel Youngs calls Vixen Media Group’s style of adult entertainment “high-end debauchery.” “It’s nice, it’s pretty, it’s fancy—but it’s also wet and dirty,” Youngs explains. That may be why the gorgeous Texan became such an ideal fit at VMG, where she has been an exclusive contract star since October. Now entering her fifth year performing at an elite level, Youngs has emerged as a versatile headliner who makes the challenging look easy, thriving in glamorous hardcore scenes just as much as in gritty gonzo encounters.  To find out what she’s doing next, fans will have to watch for updates on VMG’s most prominent studio brands—namely Blacked, Vixen, Tushy, Deeper and Slayed. “I’m going to be doing Slayed and Vixen in February,” Youngs says. “Those are the only two I haven’t done yet.” The 23-year-old star, a former IHOP waitress who eased into adult during the pandemic in 2020 when she was 18, is one of the rare performers who already has landed three major contracts within the first five years of their careers. The 2025 nominee for AVN Female Performer of the Year signed an exclusive pact with Reality Kings in October 2021 at 19 and then with Brazzers in June 2022, when she was 20. In between those deals, Youngs shot for a who’s who of porn on her way to racking up 450 credits at press time. Angel says working closely with such reputable studios has been a blessing that she doesn’t take for granted. “I feel like they all happened so fast and I love being contracted,” Youngs tells AVN. “I think it fit how I wanted to go about my career so well. “Because when I first started and I was shooting for every company—one month I did like 25 scenes. Obviously, it’s great money and it gets me out there and I’m so glad I did it. It’s just a lot… “And some people can do two, three scenes a day and that’s amazing. I can do one scene a day max. I think the contract was more my speed and I think it fit really well.” Youngs explains that she gained invaluable experience from her time as a ZZ contract girl. “I learned a lot as a performer. I worked with a lot of amazing people and I definitely grew as a performer, as a peer, as a co-worker. It was really nice being a part of a porn family,” she continues. “Because I’ve been always looking for that and it seemed like that kind of went away right when COVID happened.” AVN Hall of Fame agent Chris Cane, the owner of Foxxx Modeling who has represented Youngs since almost the beginning of her career, says he isn’t surprised by her rapid rise. The 25-plus-year industry veteran points to Youngs’ “dynamic personality” as the primary reason why she has been in demand for her entire career. “She’s very outgoing, very vivacious,” Cane tells AVN. “She always has tons of energy. That would be the number one thing. Then of course there is her natural beauty and the quality of the scenes she does. She does excellent scenes and truly enjoys adult.” Youngs calls her rapport with Cane “amazing.” “He’s become a friend,” she says. “I trust him, I trust that he gives me good advice. It was meant to be that he became my agent for sure.” Adds Cane, “I think whenever you get into a relationship with somebody especially at the beginning both sides are a little cautious on which direction things are going. So as an agent the best thing you can do is be honest with your models. “Angel found out I was very honest and very open about things and ultimately she knew I always had her back and would support her.” That kind of steady guidance from Cane was what Youngs needed as an 18- and 19-year-old trying to navigate the industry. Now Angel addresses the age question with the perspective of time. “The thing that people debate about—is 18 old enough? On one hand, I didn’t take it lightly,” she says. “I know it’s easy to take doing porn lightly because you need money or whatever the case may be, but I knew I didn’t want to just be in porn for six months and then leave. “Because I’m not going to put my whole pussy on the internet for nothing and just go do whatever afterward. But I will say I was more naive then, that’s for sure. I was willing to do more. Which has one, helped my career a lot. But also it can have it’s gray lines. So I think I have changed a lot. “I’ve figured out what I am OK with, what I’m not OK with, what I like as a performer, what I like in sex. It’s helped me a lot.” She continues, “I’ve just grown a lot in that sense, even though I’m not willing to do as much as I used to do I guess. But that’s OK, as long as I’m enjoying my job. Because that’s the most important thing.” But finding enjoyment in whatever she’s doing has never been hard for Youngs. In fact, she may have been having a little too much fun job hopping before porn. She recalls working as a janitor at the mall, as a hostess at Applebee’s, serving pretzels at Auntie Anne’s, making drinks at Smoothie King and slinging pancakes at IHOP. “I honestly could not keep a job before this,” Youngs jokes, noting that she probably had her job at IHOP the longest—about six months. Soon after her 18th birthday in January 2020, she wanted to try stripping at a topless club in Austin. “And I did it for a couple months and then the pandemic hit,” Angel says. At some point during the early months of the nationwide shutdown, she started her OnlyFans, which to this day is thriving. And in April 2020 she made a solo appearance on FTV Girls, driving around the Phoenix area in various states of nakedness while the streets were empty. While she considers her official start in the business to be more like September 2020, what hasn’t changed from Day One is her positive attitude. “It’s so different now, but it’s the same,” Youngs tells AVN. “I love my job. I love performing. I love the act of doing a scene and that has always stayed the same, but obviously it is different. “I was just ready to do anything and everything and I was so like, oh my God, porn! All this new money that I’m getting that I’ve never gotten before. “Versus now, I’ve gotten that money for some time now and I’m actually saving it and making money on top of the money rather than just like fucking it off. So it’s more of a mature mindset towards it. “And it’s also about protecting my peace when it comes to certain scenes.” Born in Manhattan, N.Y., and raised in Austin, Angel tells AVN she moved back to New York in October. “I was in LA [for two years] and then I moved back to Texas for a year and then I met my boyfriend who used to do porn and he’s from New York and we got a place together,” she explains. “It all happened very fast. My lease was up in October and I was like let’s get it going. “I’m loving it. It’s cold as fuck, but I do enjoy being really close to mountains to snowboard. I’ve been trying to snowboard more.” Youngs at the time of this interview expressed gratitude for being nominated for the top performing award in adult for the second straight year. “It feels amazing. I don’t think I deserve it this year,” she says. “But still even to be considered is a blessing and it feels really good.” When she looks ahead to the rest of 2025, she says without hesitation, “I think I just want to make art with my scenes and I want to keep being creative.” “I love to feel inspired by some out-of-the-ordinary-type of scene. That’s my goal, just to be more creative with my scenes,” she says. She notes that nowadays, OnlyFans is “where the money’s at.” “It’s good to put my effort into it while the publicity is the porn,” Angel says, adding that the comfortable income she earns from OF “feels weirdly normalized.” “But it definitely has made me grow up a bunch. You can’t just fuck it off, you really can’t. That’s your future, right?” For those who haven’t checked out Youngs’ OF content, she says a subscription gives fans numerous options. “I do customs, I do sexting sets, I have everything,” Angel says. “What I’ve noticed with OnlyFans girls vs. porn girls is a lot of OnlyFans girls do very short videos and it’s a lot different than porn performers. We’re doing 20- to 30-minute scenes [in mainstream porn] and we’re putting a lot more into it. Everything’s so different now. Like the fans care about very basic stuff. “I say I want to do more creative stuff and I do, but the real money is in the POV style—like the girlfriend experience at home.” Youngs shot her AVN cover in New York with Anouk Brouwer, wearing a vintage Levi’s jean jacket in several of the images. “That jacket is really important to me, it’s my dad’s,” Youngs says. She sports several tattoos, most of which she got just for fun. One of them says simply, “DRIVE SLOW.” “That is actually a Kanye song,” Angel explains. “It’s kind of like, have patience, take life slower, don’t move so fast. But I’m also obsessed with Kanye.” She has another on her upper left arm for her wiener dog Bubba—whom she calls “my porn mascot.” And another one that says, “I HOPE YOU DANCE.” “It’s a sign my mom had in my room since growing up,” she says. “It’s a childhood memory.” One thing is sure: after four years in adult entertainment, Angel Youngs is still dancing. Photography by @anoukdbrouwer