What it’s like to shoot an amateur scene with James Deen

Hey, James Deen fangirls: If you’re over 18, STI-free, and willing to appear naked on the Internet, you too could have a magical horizontal encounter with the nicest Jewish boy in porn. So says 33-year-old advertising and marketing manager/stand-up comedian Jenn Tisdale, who penned an account of shooting an amateur porn with Deen for her employer, the D.C.-based website Brightest Young Things.

According to the piece, Tisdale’s porn adventure began when Deen put out a call on Twitter for amateur performers to shoot a scene with him:

my scene got cancelled today 🙁 i guess i could shoot amateur porn for https://t.co/jJmyEuf1Uy… anyone want to shoot a porno with me?

— James Deen (@JamesDeen) September 5, 2013

i am not joking in regards to shooting a scene with me. https://t.co/jB4fzEx5HS

— James Deen (@JamesDeen) September 5, 2013

As a sporadic porn watcher, Tisdale wasn’t overly familiar with Deen’s oeuvre. Although she enjoyed what she’d seen of his adult work, her first introduction to Deen was through his performance in Bret Easton Ellis’s The Canyons. “I didn’t go into it as a giggling uber-fan,” she told the Daily Dot. “I just submitted and honestly didn’t expect for them to email me back.” When she heard from his model coordinator a few hours later, they arranged a time to shoot in New York the following weekend.

In the days leading up to the shoot, Tisdale communicated with Deen via email. While she says she watched one of his amateur porn scenes, she didn’t do much else by way of prep. “It’s kinda like as a comic, I don’t watch a lot of other comics, because what if I start imitating what they do?” she says. “I thought, ‘let’s just try to keep this as fresh as possible.’”  

When the day of the shoot arrived, Tisdale met Deen at the hotel room she had booked in New York. Tisdale likened the encounter to an OKCupid date, “because we’d been chatting online and now we were meeting in person and I was like, ‘What if he doesn’t think I’m attractive? What if we don’t get along?’ Just normal first-date jitters stuff.”

Although she was nervous, Tisdale says Deen made a concerted effort to put her at ease, chatting over coffee and reading text messages aloud to each other while strolling through the streets of New York.

When they finally returned to the hotel, Tisdale shot two scenes with Deen: one in the bedroom, one in the bathroom. There was no crew present, just the two performers and what Tisdale refers to as “a very nice camera.”

“I didn’t even notice it was there, honestly,” she says. “I was just like, Here’s James, he’s my buddy, and we’re gonna do it now.”

Although Tisdale, who is credited under the name “Gwen Derringer,” has not seen her scenes yet—“I don’t even like to hear my voice on a voicemail, so I can’t imagine being like, let’s just watch this porn I did,” she says—they’re now available for download on Deen’s website (an obviously NSFW trailer is also available). She still communicates with Deen via email and text, and considers him a friend (“like, the kind you slept with, who’s slept with a lot more people on-camera before you”).

While it’s unlikely there’ll be a repeat performance in the future—James Deen is dating fellow adult film star Stoya—overall, Tisdale has incredibly positive feelings about the experience. For the most part, she’s received a great deal of support from her friends and family, including her boss and mother. And she sniffs at the flak she’s received so far from a handful of members of the stand-up community, who’ve accused Tisdale of shooting a porn for the sake of having a scandalous story to tell.

“I don’t understand that at all,” she says. “It’s like going skydiving. Are you jumping out of a plane because you’re dying to jump out of the plane, or are you also kinda doing it so you can tell people you jumped out of a plane? I’m proud of it, I’m excited about it, and why wouldn’t I be?”

H/T Brightest Young Things | Screengrab via YouTube