Maitland Ward—a mainstream actress best known for her stint on Disney’s Boy Meets World—shocked the world when she announced she was switching from mainstream to porn. Then she shocked everyone outside the industry by sticking with it—and those inside by becoming an outspoken advocate of the industry. She kept shocking people when she signed a contract with Deeper, then extended that contract until at least 2022. Now, she’s doubled down on that commitment by writing an essay for the Daily Beast about how porn was the best decision she ever made.

“Many expected my rise in the adult world, including many in the adult world itself, to be a flash in the pan. It was a stunt. I wasn’t serious. No one from mainstream ever is,” she wrote, describing how she could have gone the standard route of a washed-up Hollywood star looking for attention: sex tape, “poor-me” media blitz, YouTube channel. “This was not me. It would never be me. I am not ashamed.”

Rather, Ward says, her career in adult entertainment has given her all the things that mainstream never could. “People will ask me if I fear that the adult industry has ruined me for mainstream. It’s quite the opposite. Mainstream ruined me for mainstream. It became limiting and I was bored. This pigeonhole they put me in grew smaller and smaller,” she wrote.

In an interview with Yahoo News this week, Ward elaborated, “Hollywood wanted to typecast me. To pigeonhole me as this light comedic actress. To be forever what I was at twenty. And while I love comedy, I love other things too.” One of those things, she implied in both the interview and the Daily Beast essay, is sex. 

But, she told the Daily Beast, “When I hit my thirties, I was told I couldn’t be sexy. A publicist said to me, in a way that seemed polite to him, that if they wanted sexy they’d get someone who was 25.”

Instead of dealing with that silliness, at the age of 42, Ward turned to porn, where older women have been making money as MILFs and beyond for years. About a year ago, in summer 2019, she announced her transition into adult films, rocketing to the top of the industry with Drive, a feature film she made with Vixen Media Group’s Deeper.com. “Subscriptions for the site and Vixen Media Group went wild. The headlines were international and viral. I trended No. 1 on Google all day, topping Bernie Sanders’ heart attack (the joke was that I gave it to him).” She went on to win a combined six AVN and Xbiz awards for her work—and it’s only been a year.

Her success makes sense, wrote Ward. “A lot of people tell me they’ve been masturbating to me for more than 20 years. Think about that. That’s no easy task—being fap material for someone for nearly three decades.” 

But rather than forever portraying the funny airhead that Boy Meets World typecast her as for mainstream, Ward wrote, “Now, I’m playing roles that I want to play. I can be dark and twisted and sexual. I’m afforded the freedom to find my voice, and that isn’t something mainstream often allows you to do. I have porn to thank for that.”

And she thinks that consumers have porn to thank for a lot more these days, too. In her interview with Yahoo News, Ward called the porn she’s making an “essential service” during the coronavirus pandemic.

“My personal content saw a major uptick during this time,” Ward said. “The human connection, that intimacy is needed now more than ever…People are really seeing now how vital adult entertainment is in times like these and will be in an uncertain future,” she said. “It’s getting us through all this mentally as well as physically. And that’s no small thing.”