LONDON — "Porno Dan" Leal of Immoral Productions has been profiled in a new feature article in The Sun newspaper.
In "Porn Again: I ditched office job to become award-winning porn director… my church-going mum never realized until one fateful day," written by Thea Jacobs, Leal discusses his evolution from office equipment salesman to porn impresario.
"I used to joke in university that I would have my own porn company one day, so I decided I'd make that a reality," Leal tells Jacobs. "I was a top salesman for a Fortune 500 company at the time, and the president allowed me to keep working there while I got my porn side off the ground."
He also talks about his journey from altar boy to prominent industry figure, and the awkward family conversations that entailed.
"My mother thought it was a joke at first," he says. "It only really clocked for her when I was on the front page of the Metro section of the Washington Post. It was the Sunday edition, and everyone in her church had read it. My poor mother, as all her friends, knew what I was doing.
"In my mom's mind, it was like being a stuntman, that I wasn't actually having sex," Leal continues. "She saw a segment [regarding Dan] on Jimmy Kimmel and rang me asking, 'why do you need condoms if it's not real,' and I had to tell her it was. Mom then informed me I had to go to church and do acts of contrition for it. After that, she was concerned about babies being conceived on set and what happened to them. So I joked we had a very fancy orphanage, which she believed before I told her it wasn't a thing. She was a very sweet woman but rather naive."
The story then goes into Leal's move from the U.S. to his current base in Budapest, Hungary, and how he's taken his adopted continent to heart by helping with aid for Ukraine.
"He became involved in trying to help thanks to seeing YouTube videos by fellow American Johnny 'FD' Jen, who he then persuaded to go back into Ukraine with him to find out what was really needed on the ground," Jacobs writes. "They decided to head into the warzone after Dan's friend in the US government said 'no one would stop them' despite it being a 'mad idea.'"
The article delves into what Leal has done to help the war-torn country, including purchasing vans to be retrofitted into ambulances and delivering solar panels to the front lines to ensure Ukrainian soldiers have power.
"I'd just had surgery for some varicose veins and got my stitches out before I went out to take these batteries like I promised," Leal says. "I'd been worried about the operation, but the surgeon in Budapest told me it was all fine. I actually had blood poisoning, but I didn't know. By the time I got to Lviv, I was in real pain, and a friend got in touch with a surgeon who saved my life. So if I'd not gone to Ukraine, I'd probably have lost my leg or died.
"It goes to show God works in strange ways," Leal concludes.
Click here to read the article.
Follow Leal on X.com.
