Nobody else in porn has had a career quite like Tommy Pistol’s.
To be sure, there are other performers who excel at dramatic acting or have starred in adult parodies of mainstream films. There may also be a handful who can reliably crack up audiences as well as their colleagues on set. There are even some who are universally respected and beloved by directors, co-stars, crew members and fans.
There is only one performer, however, who came through the late-1990s mainstream comedy scene in New York — the heyday of the Upright Citizens Brigade and ground zero for much of modern sketch, sitcom and stand-up — before entering the adult industry and becoming a central figure in what came to be known as “alt porn,” bringing with him the artsy, punky sensibility of pre-YouTubers raised on cult movie VHS tapes and absurdist humor.
Two decades later, not only is Tommy Pistol still around, but he continues to inspire some of the industry’s top directors — and several respected mainstream auteurs as well — to write parts specifically for his talents.
“True story: When I was a young guy, I threw a coin into a fountain, and my wish was to be famous,” Pistol tells XBIZ during a recent exclusive interview commemorating his 20th year as an adult performer.
“I should have been more specific,” he laughs.
That’s pure Tommy Pistol: hilarious, humble and self-deprecating, with a true artist’s ambivalence about fame. Despite his track record and a suitcase full of awards, he knows that every new day delivers a blank slate and the challenge to prove yourself again and again.
“Where I am at currently, I would say, is a fork in the road,” Pistol reveals. “After 20 years performing, I am at a point where I need to start getting serious about the next step.”
Pistol is by no means sick of performing, he clarifies.
“As much as I still give my all in every performance, mentally, physically and emotionally, for both scenes and features, I have begun asking myself, ‘What am I getting out of this after all these years?’
“I think that’s an honest question,” he adds. “As you get older in this job, even if everyone likes you and you are still doing great work, you have to face that this is a younger guy club.
“Even though I look amazing for my age!” he laughs again.
Pistol’s current goal, he says, is to get behind the camera as much as he can, and earn as much trust and respect there as he has earned in front of it.
“I just want to be able to do my thing and create,” he says.
Partners in Creation
Pistol’s big upcoming title in 2025 is multi-award-winning director Ricky Greenwood’s “Strip,” a Dorcel feature with a projected September release date, in time for award season consideration. A very high-profile project thanks to being a studio porn comeback of sorts for superstar Riley Reid, “Strip” also serves as the continuation of the ongoing collaboration between Greenwood and Pistol.
Twenty years after breaking into the industry and garnering attention for his eccentric cult horror and comedy roles, Pistol has become the porn version of De Niro to Greenwood’s Scorsese.
“I’m really excited about ‘Strip,’” Pistol says. “It’s one of the best roles I’ve ever had. Ricky allowed me to portray a truly multidimensional character, to give him a backstory and really make him come to life.”
What makes the character of strip club owner Tommy so interesting, he adds, is that while he comes across like a sleazy villain, he’s also just what society turned him into.
“He’s just trying to get a grip on his gambling problem,” Pistol explains. “He hit a point where he actually got ahead, but his greedy naiveté, thinking that anything is possible, bites him in the ass and everything crumbles. He’s not the greatest, but there’s also another way to look at him: the way he looks at himself. The world sucks, and if you don’t fucking fight to get what you want, you fucking die. So you kind of have to have that mentality.”
Greenwood is fond of dramatically altering Pistol’s appearance for his various roles, such as his celebrated turn as a nasty, bald, aging biker for “Grinders,” the director’s 2022 skating melodrama. The elaborate makeup designs help Pistol develop characters that require a deeper dive than most standard adult scene work.
“Usually when you get porn scripts, we’re not rehearsing together, nobody’s getting together a couple times a week to go over dialogue,” Pistol notes. “They throw it all at you that same day. But with Ricky, after reading the parts he writes for me, I usually consider that I’m going to have this whole different appearance. That helps unlock the character.”
“Strip” is no exception. Pistol says he is prouder of the project than of anything he has done so far in his two-decade career.
“The way it came out, the way it looks — I’m really excited for people to see it,” he enthuses. “Ricky is a great director. He’s one of the best in our industry, for sure. He has an amazing crew and he’s earned their respect. He keeps his word, for work and everything else. When you do that, and you give people that safety net, they will give you their very best.
“Working with him over the years, and seeing the roles he’s given me, I’m just purely grateful,” Pistol shares. “Ricky is one of the people who really saw my drive and my talent and what I could bring. He believed in me, so I want to always give him the best that I have.”
A Creative Adventurer
Pistol and Greenwood also share a common background as dedicated fans of movie history, particularly cult movies, and a lifelong interest in creating the kinds of stories they themselves love.
As an example, Pistol cites Greenwood’s 2021 short film “The Bargain,” a Krampus-themed horror story co-starring Ashley Lane in terrifying full-body demonic makeup. The project meant so much to the director that when studios passed on it, he funded it himself.
“I think Ricky and I have the same love for making movies, for being a part of it, for creating,” Pistol reflects. “We were always on the same page about that. Some other performers may be more into the sex aspect of the job, or their physical attributes, and they may not have embraced Ricky’s vision about acting. I was lucky that I was there to help him realize these characters.”
Following through on his behind-the-camera aspirations, Pistol is currently directing for Kink.com and hopes to expand his portfolio with other studios.
“I’ve been working for Kink since the very beginning of my career,” he recalls. “They have done me well, and I respect that. I always want to give them my best. I also met my life partner at Kink, when she was working as a cinematographer there.”
He has also met with Adult Time, a company known for helping performers branch out, and where he serves as a brand ambassador. Though focused on demonstrating that he can deliver as a director, he still sometimes encounters ingrained assumptions about performers.
“I have directed for years for Naughty America, and I’ve been fundamental in creating successful projects from the very beginning, when I was working with Burning Angel — I’ve even directed mainstream things,” Pistol points out. “But it’s an old story: you can perform for studios and do all these crazy sex acts, and put your body through all this stuff, but sometimes they just see you as talent. When you propose a creative project, they look at you like you’ve got a chicken on your head.”
He laughs, shaking his head.
The record indeed shows that Pistol has been creating all along, ever since the early 1990s.
“I started in a sketch comedy group with friends,” he recalls. “We all met in high school in New York. That was 1992 or 1993. We did that for about 12 years, before I even got into porn.”
The group was called Cheese Theatre. On its YouTube channel, still up and running, a youthful Pistol can be seen performing sketches such as “Fist Puppets,” an early iteration of his ongoing fascination with puppets — for more on which, you may or may not want to Google “Puppet Insanity with Tommy Pistol and Honey Gold.”
The project started off as just three friends writing and creating for public access TV, but became a decade-plus experience.
“We were ahead of our time,” Pistol says. “We didn’t have the advantage of YouTube,. We are talking about a time when not everybody had computers. We put out our own videotapes and sometimes rented a small theater to screen it for our friends.”
As the sketch group was winding down, Pistol became part of the motley Brooklyn crew who would revolutionize porn through Burning Angel. By 2006, he was co-starring in the seminal horror parody “The XXXorcist,” playing Father Merkin and casting demons out of company icon Joanna Angel.
Often described as a zany family, Burning Angel was a plucky group of tattooed East Coast miscreants and creative theater nerds hanging out on and off set. This was not glitzy Los Angeles porn a la Vivid or Wicked. It was decidedly New York, informed by indie theater and alternative culture.
Pistol proved himself an MVP in odd parodies like the club kid “Party Monster” send-up “Porny Monsters,” won praise for an oddly choreographed musical number in the metafictional, porn-history referential “Neu Wave Hookers,” and delivered tour-de-force performances in the 2004 “Re-Animator” spoof “Re-Penetrator” and as Pee-Wee Herman in 2012’s “Pee-Wee’s XXX Adventure.”
As a result, critics acknowledged him as “a unique talent.” He was a chameleon, effortlessly switching from Austin Powers comedy to adult horror parodies like“Evil Head.”
In many of those projects, Pistol was also a crucial presence behind the camera, often taking up directorial duties even if the credits said otherwise. As a behind-the-scenes creative, he sometimes had to shoot 60 zombies, sex scenes and even fight scenes — he has long been a licensed stuntman — all on a three-day schedule.
“I choreographed and wrote and directed and acted in some parodies that made the most money the industry ever made,” he affirms. “This was before the tube sites, so it was DVD money!”
By the late 2010s, however, Pistol had begun to feel a bit burnt out. The scenes he was being asked to perform in had begun to feel repetitive.
“I was at a point where I was getting really bored, because nothing was really pushing me acting-wise,” he remembers. “Everything was either a parody or gonzo. You’re just a stepfather or a doctor.”
This changed when Adult Time’s Bree Mills launched Pure Taboo. Suddenly, Pistol’s acting talents were in demand again.
“It was exciting,” Pistol says. “Pure Taboo prompted me to become alive again within adult. I could access demanding, dark, seedy, even kind of depressing roles. It was me digging deep into the material and asking myself, ‘What can I bring to this? Am I just going to give them what they want, or am I going to come here ready with something?’
“Every time I did that, it helped me develop and become a better actor,” he adds. “I was excited to memorize and learn scripts more and also to do more improv. Since I came from an improv background before I started adult, this was the next piece of the puzzle I needed to become a better actor.”
The industry noticed — and has kept noticing. Pistol holds a record number of acting awards for movies like “Taxi Driver: A XXX Parody” (2012), “Not Jersey Boys XXX: A Porn Musical” and “American Hustle XXX” (2015), “Wild Inside” (2016), “Suicide Squad XXX: An Axel Braun Parody” (2017), “Ingenue” (2018), “Weight of Infidelity” and “Anne: A Taboo Parody” (2019), “Pistol Whipped” and “Future Darkly: The Aura Doll” (2020), “Deranged” (2023) and 2025’s “Project X.”
Meanwhile, parallel to his adult career and performing under his legal name, Pistol has jumped at every chance to be involved in mainstream productions. In 2010, he directed the metafictional horror comedy “The Gruesome Death of Tommy Pistol,” full of practical effects and the same sensibility that has blown up in theaters in the 2020s with the “Terrifier” franchise. Again, ahead of his time.
Most recently, he can be seen as Scissors the clown in Harry Sparks’ 2024 horror thriller, an homage to ’70s and ’80 slasher films featuring a cast comprised mostly of adult performers.
The Long Run
While waiting for the world to see his villain turn in “Strip,” Pistol is on a career high fueled by a small but pivotal role in the mainstream drama “The Long Run,” currently playing festivals. Directed by his friend Mylissa Fitzsimmons and edited by Pistol’s partner, “The Long Run” offered him a rare chance to play a straight-up dramatic role.
“Mylissa is a great filmmaker, and it was really an honor for her to give me a chance to be in her movie,” he says. “It was a small part, but it still had a lot of meaning to it — and what she wrote, she wrote personally for me to deliver. We didn’t get to rehearse it until the day we were shooting it, and we were shooting in a diner that they couldn’t shut down while we shot. So I gave this long, heartfelt, sad monologue while people were eating and talking and going about their business. It was a nice challenge to be able to do that.”
Festival audiences have responded enthusiastically to Pistol’s performance.
“When you’re still trying to convince people that you can act or deserve a chance, to hear someone call it ‘brilliant’ is a big deal,” he shares.
A more bittersweet topic is the Soska Sisters’ “On the Edge,” a controversial BDSM-themed body horror feature. Though shot and finished a couple of years ago, the project has been entangled in a confusing distribution standoff.
“I’ve known the Soska Sisters for almost 15 years, and have been a fan of their work,” Pistol says. “So when they offered me a lead role it was amazing. I had a month to lose as much weight as I could for the part. I was going to be nude a lot in it, and was going to be tortured. And I had to learn a 90-page script.”
By all accounts, “On the Edge” is a harrowing minor masterpiece by the auteurs of cult classic “American Mary,” essentially a physical acting cage match between Pistol and Jen Soska, who plays a sadistic dominatrix.
“When I read the script, it felt kind of humiliating,” he says. “Which is funny if you know my career in adult. I was like, ‘Why would they send this to me? Why do they think I would do it?’ But the more I read it, the more it made sense. It means more for somebody to come from my background and do a movie about somebody getting tortured.”
For Pistol, the job opened a creative window into the perceptions and assumptions that he has been dealing with for two decades.
“Once people hear you do porn, it’s a different conversation,” he says. “So for me to do a movie like this, showing my vulnerability as somebody who is tortured and crying, and staying in this mind frame the whole time we were working on it, was very meaningful.
“It was literally the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he adds. “I hope they sort things out and people can see it.”
There’s also “Red-Light,” a TV pilot written by Pistol and his partner — about a man transitioning out of the adult industry and wondering what he’s going to do with the rest of his life.
Watching today’s independent creators with admiration has prompted Pistol to reflect on his own position and future.
“I want to stay in the industry, but I’ve got to make a decision,” he says. “I see what Little Puck is doing, and I think she’s killing it. I think she’s making enough money where she could produce the things she’s doing at a very high level. That’s inspiring. It makes me want to really do things on my own.
“Twenty years on this journey, and I still keep learning as I go,” he concludes. “It is not easy. It’s challenging. But that’s the game: learning, and having that fire underneath to keep me going.
