Sasha Grey: The New Pornographer
The showroom at the Doc Johnson world headquarters in North Hollywood, California, is a brightly lit space with a long wooden conference table and walls lined with colorful boxes of sex toys: There’s the Ass Servant, the Gumdrops Double Bubble Butt Plug and a five-pound, 15-inch purple dildo called the Great American Challenge. Perched on a small table at the side of the room are what look like two lumps of grayish clay on a plywood board. On an afternoon in late February, Chad Braverman, Doc Johnson’s director of product development and licensing, walks Sasha Grey into the room and motions toward the clay.
“That’s your ass and vagina,” he says flatly. Upon closer inspection, the lumps are accurate renderings of the adult film star’s prized assets. Two months earlier, the slender Grey, who turned 21 in March, had her nether regions coated in plaster to create a mold for her first branded sex toy, a durable thermoplastic rubber replica that will retail for about $100.
“It looks really good,” Grey says running her fingers over her faux backside. “It’ll have hair, right? ’Cause I’ve got a bush.”
For an adult-film star, getting a sex toy is like an NBA player inking a shoe deal: It’s a sign you’ve arrived. And three years after inaugurating her porn career by asking costar Rocco Siffredi to punch her in the stomach while she pleasured him (he declined), Grey definitely has made it. Across more than 120 adult films, her appetite for extreme sex has established her rep, but it’s her intellectual side—she counts French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and industrial rockers Throbbing Gristle among her heroes—that has set her apart.
Although her turns in videos for the Roots (“Birthday Girl”) and Smashing Pumpkins (“Superchrist”) and a NSFW American Apparel ad are well within the range of traditional porn-star extracurriculars, not much else she does is. She’s one-half of challenging experimental-music duo Atelecine and has contributed vocals to a track by Jamaican dub pioneer Lee “Scratch” Perry. She’s already appeared (fully clothed) in a few small indie flicks, and this May she’ll play the lead in Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh’s low-budget film about a high-priced call girl, The Girlfriend Experience. It’s enough to make your average porn star give up a life lived on her back—or side or all fours—but not Grey.
“I’ll never say ‘fuck you’ to the adult industry,” she insists. “I don’t see it as porn versus mainstream—I really don’t see a division. I see it all as a career opportunity for my brand.”
So, armed with shrewd business acumen, defiantly libertine ideals, the latest in social-networking tools and a frame with barely-legal contours, Grey is building that brand. She’s starting her own company to produce intelligent porn that focuses on real acting, rather than mechanical, unimaginative copulation. At the same time, she’s trying to further her mainstream film career, develop cachet in the experimental-music world and cultivate a growing fan base that often seems as interested in her brains as they are in her body.
“My whole thing is to bridge that gap,” she says. “To say, ‘Yeah, I have sex on camera, but I can act, make music, draw, paint and write poetry.’ I consider myself a Renaissance woman.”
Grey rarely drinks, doesn’t do drugs and, contrary to the prevailing stereotype, says she was never abused as a child. As Soderbergh sees it, “She’s a new breed. She’s a mold-breaker.”
The night before the Doc Johnson visit, Grey sits with her fiancé, lanky 33-year-old photographer Ian Cinnamon,
at a Studio City coffee shop, discussing what led her into the porn industry. Her dark hair falls over her right shoulder in a ponytail, laying flat against her gray-checked overcoat. Her heavy blue eye shadow stands out starkly against the pale skin of her girlish face. Earlier today, she was scheduled to film
an adult scene, but her female costar arrived bearing a positive test result for an STD. Grey refused the director’s request to
film anyway. “I don’t have many rules, but I won’t perform unless the other person has been tested in the last two days,” she says.
Grey grew up in a rundown area of Sacramento, the youngest of three children. Before she started middle school, her Catholic mom and non-churchgoing dad split up. Her father took off, and her mom remarried, but Sasha didn’t get along with her stepdad. She started writing songs (“mostly raps”) at age 10 and playing guitar three years later. Her youthful tastes leaned toward Hendrix, Pink Floyd and P-Funk, though with time she gravitated toward more experimental stuff like Miles Davis, Neu! and KMFDM. (Her porn name, Sasha, is a tribute to KMFDM frontman Sascha Konietzko; her last name is a nod to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and the “gray zone” on the Kinsey scale of sexuality, which rejects strict delineations between gay and straight.)
She began taking acting classes at 12. In high school, she coproduced and starred in a film about “a 17-year-old runaway who is raped by her brother and father, goes to California and joins the circus.” By the time Grey was 17, she was taking college classes, waitressing six nights a week and watching lots of porn with her then boyfriend.
“The light bulb went off: I can do this a lot better than the people I’m watching,” she says. “For seven months before I moved to L.A., I did as much research as I could”—devouring more porn, reading interviews with stars and directors—“so I was 100 percent confident in my decision to go for it.”
According to Dan Miller, editor-in-chief of Adult Video
News, her impact in the porn world was almost immediate. “When she came on the scene, she had a distinct look, sexy and mysterious,” he says. “She was bringing passion, intensity and
a different energy to her scenes.”
Grey considers her scenes performance art and believes they should constantly stretch the limits of what’s deemed acceptable. “But porn can’t just be transgressive with sex acts; it has to be transgressive in all aspects of the performance,” she says. “For a few years, porn was all about fisting and orgies. People got used to that. I want to start making a product people want to watch as if they were at the movies and said, ‘I wish I could see those people have sex.’” She cites Catherine Breillat—the first director to include a fully erect penis in a mainstream French film, 1999’s Romance—as an inspiration to make movies “where it’s erotic, you can masturbate if you want, but you don’t have to.”
Grey isn’t the first porn star to venture outside the adult industry. Marilyn Chambers and Ginger Lynn have made mainstream films. Traci Lords’ acting career included a stint on Roseanne. Jenna Jameson published a New York Times–best-selling memoir.
But Jane’s Addiction guitarist
Dave Navarro, who met Grey in 2007 when he cast her in Broken, an adult film he directed, insists her appeal is unique. “Broken’s opening scene demanded an emotional collapse,” he says. “I needed her writhing on the bathroom floor, crying. She was phenomenal. I told her, ‘You’re really talented in a way I haven’t seen before in this industry.’” Last year, Navarro signed Grey to his management company, the Spread Group.
Roots drummer Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, who met Grey through Navarro, says her charm has more to do with a “cool factor” than a “porn-star factor”: “The first time we met, I invited her to a Fiona Apple jam session. I
was on drums, and the audience was full of celebrities—Prince, Tom Cruise,
Jay-Z and Beyoncé. But I only noticed one person. Sasha stood out instantly.”
That neither Thompson nor Navarro had any hand in Atelecine is indicative of the esoteric nature of Grey’s project, a collaboration with sound designer Pablo St. Francis, whom she met at a strip club. The dark, moody noise collage on Atelecine’s vinyl-only debut EP, aVigillant Carpark, makes minimalist composer Steve Reich sound like Usher by comparison. Grey plays guitar and synths, manipulates tape loops and provides mostly incomprehensible vocals. “Some people will think it’s a joke or buy it because they think she’s going to be naked on the cover,” St. Francis says. “If she was doing this to make money, she’d put out a Britney Spears–type single.”
In contrast to her other pursuits, Grey says she’s self-conscious about her musical abilities; she credits St. Francis with drawing her out of her shell. The duo is working on a full-length album and plan to perform live for the first time this fall.
In some ways, the music itself is beside the point. It’s the very fact that she indulges such left-field whims that turns her admirers on. She keeps in near-constant communication with them via Twitter and her MySpace page, which lists among her interests electro act Aphex Twin, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard and “my butthole.” In the course of one week last winter, her MySpace comments included messages from fans quoting Kierkegaard, sharing their thoughts on Bauhaus design and thanking her for turning them on to Nietzche.
“I didn’t think MySpace would have the impact it did, but I think subconsciously I knew nobody else [in porn] was into this stuff,” Grey says. “Plus, career-wise, I get job opportunities through there. That’s how the Soderbergh thing happened.”
Soderbergh first learned about Grey through a 2006 Los Angeles magazine piece. When the idea arose for The Girlfriend Experience, he contacted her through MySpace, and she soon became the model for the protagonist in the unscripted film. Grey plays a confident, business-savvy call girl with an (initially) understanding boyfriend. While parallels to Grey’s own life were mostly intentional, Soderbergh says they shouldn’t diminish her performance: “There’s no question she can act. She has a real presence.”
Despite the film’s subject, there’s very little nudity in it. It’s not really about sex, but rather about money and social class in uncertain times. Grey is extremely convincing as an icier version of the focused striver she comes off as in real life. The question now is whether she will be able to persuade enough directors, taste-makers and moviegoers to ignore—or embrace—her porn career. Talks with several Hollywood agents stalled because their firms wouldn’t sign someone whose credits include Grand Theft Anal 11 for fear of upsetting bigger clients or because they represent child actors. And as Grey puts it, “I’m not going to be in a PG-13 kids’ movie, because big companies aren’t going to finance it.”
None of this particularly bothers her, she insists: “Some might say, ‘I don’t care if you did this [mainstream] movie or that stupid music, you’re just a dirty, sick, white-trash porn star and that’s all you’ll ever be.’ People need something to vilify. I’m OK being that.”
A few hours after her Doc Johnson meeting, Grey is back in Studio City at a sushi restaurant, talking about her favorite subject: film. “The Wrestler reminded me a lot of porn,” she says. “It’s a romantic film—doing what you love until the day you die. I can relate.”
Given Grey’s steadfast embrace of her porn career despite some real costs, it’s easy to understand her connection with the movie. But as a story about a guy who sacrifices his family, his stability, his health and perhaps his life at the altar of his passion—might it not also be seen as a cautionary tale?
