Dakota Fanning’s got nothing on Sasha Grey. At the age of 21, Sasha Grey has appeared in over 150 films. The catch? They’re all adult films. At the age of 18, she moved out to Hollywood with one goal in mind: Become an adult film star. Done and done — she’s one of the biggest names in the business today. Now she can add another kind of film to her resume — she stars in Stephen Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, playing a high-class Manhattan escort against the backdrop of late 2008’s economic tumble and Presidential election. I watched the film’s screener a couple days ago, and I was genuinely impressed. She’s not a Traci Lords or Jenna Jameson, where any mainstream effort feels unnatural, like a fish out of water. She acts like an actress. She’s a natural. There’s a lot of buzz around this young woman, and rightly so. She’s got the chops to be the first actress to cross over from adult films to a viable mainstream career.
I talked to Sasha around four o'clock, in the middle of an all day press junket. As a previous interviewer tweeted: “Jeez, who didn’t talk to @sashagrey today?” She was exhausted, understandably. “I’ve been up since six,” she says, “and I’m not a morning person. But I’m hanging in there.” Since Sasha’s positioned herself as the “intellectual” porn star — she loves to talk to reporters about existentialism and Jean-Luc Godard and other topics suitably pretentious — I had hoped to spend the second half of the interview grilling her with a spelling bee. Tragically, we ran out of time. Here’s what we did get to:
I’d expected your character in your film to be more like the person you are in interviews. I expected you to be playing yourself. But you’re not – you’re really playing a character here. Were you nervous about whether or not you could make that transition, since you’ve said that in your adult-film work you play yourself?
Yeah, I was really excited and happy to be able to prepare for this character, and I did as much as I could. Obviously, the thing I was nervous about the most would be a) working with Stephen and b) Relaxing in front of the camera. Because it’s so easy to be yourself in front of a camera, but to embody this person and talk the way this person would talk was really difficult for the first three or four days – settling in and getting used to that aspect of it.
Your character in the film is both worldly and, in a lot of ways, also naïve. You came to Hollywood knowing exactly what you wanted to do, and exactly what you were getting into. I’m wondering if it turned out like you expected.
Even better than I expected. Because I was going to porno Hollywood. [laughs] I expected to be in this business for seven or eight years, and direct a few of my own adult films, and kind of make an effect in the inner industry. And that impact, socially and culturally speaking, has gone a lot further than I’d ever expected. And my career and my life has gone even further than I ever would have expected – in a positive direction.
You embrace your sexuality and the outer limits of female sexuality, and you’ve talked about one of your goals being to promote acceptance of female sexuality. Where did that come from? How were you raised with regards to those issues? When did this mission start?
I was the oldest virgin out of all my friends. I was never really able to have an open dialogue with my mother or my sister about sexuality. I was always made to feel so ashamed. I think once I finally started having sex, it was like a light bulb went off, almost. I found it ridiculous that I was made to feel so guilty about the fantasies that I had. In talking to my girlfriends about their sexual experiences, sometimes they would think some of the stuff that I was into was crazy and weird. And I just thought, you know, why should we have to have that outlook on our sexuality? Everybody’s different, and everybody’s allowed to have their own tastes, as long as they’re not hurting anybody.
As you become more of a mainstream figure and a recognizable name, there’s been something of a backlash against you and what you do for a living. A lot of people don’t seem to appreciate or understand what you stand for. Does that hurt you?
No, it doesn’t hurt my feelings. You have to have a strong backbone if you work in the entertainment business, whether it be adult films or not. Everybody’s entitled to their own opinions. You don’t have to subscribe to my opinion and I don’t have to subscribe to yours, and that’s that.
I know you’re interested in getting into music. Tell me more about that.
Yeah, my band ATelecine released an EP in January. We’re also working on a full-length album; it’ll be a ten-inch. It’s all done through a Brooklyn-based label. It’s really experimental in the truest sense, because, true to my character, I try not to repeat things I’ve done in the past in a creative sense. [You can listen to some of their trackshere. She wasn't kidding when she called it experimental.]
So what was it like in school for you? Were you a good student?
I was a good student. I hated school, though. [laughs] I had a lot of friends, I was sort of a pretty good kid. I was sneaky, but I always did what I had to get done. I just hated school.
What were your favorite subjects?
English, definitely. I like to write.
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