Stephen Lawton, Ethan Miller/Getty ImagesThere are porn stars in Miley Cyrus's new video and Lindsay Lohan's next movie. Does that mean porn is getting officially mainstream now?
—Asia, via Twitter
Don't forget that Steven Soderbergh hired Sasha Grey to star in The Girlfriend Experience. And of course, you're also talking about James Deen, who appears with Lohan in the upcoming movie The Canyons. As for Cyrus, yep, you can catch porn star Jessie Andrews in the brand-new video she made with dubstep artist Borgore, "Decisions." So you ask, is porn now mainstream.
I could offer my lone opinion. But, really, to get the best answer for a question like this, you've gotta ask a porn star. And that's exactly what I did.
I spoke with Joanna Angel, who, like many porn stars, does get the occasional mainstream offer. For example, she recently shot Scrapper, which costars Game of Thrones series regular Aidan Gillen.
However, she says, there's no new trend here.
"There have always been in porn, one or two people who have real crossover appeal," she says. "I don't think this is a brand-new thing."
She has a point, especially when you consider that Traci Lords was getting mainstream work back in the late 1980s.
"I feel like this has been going on for 15 to 20 years," says Brian Gross, a publicist who specializes in adult entertainment stars.
So, while it may seem new, having Deen partnering with LiLo onscreen, it isn't really. And it's not a phenomenon that's getting particularly common.
"There will always be a couple of people who have that mainstream appeal," Angel explains. "But it's not like it's gotten to the point where porn and mainstream actors are interchangeable. You don't have directors thinking, like, ‘Oh, should I cast Jack Nicholson or should we use Ron Jeremy?'"