An Interview With Johnny Sins: The Most Hardworking Man in The World

You know who he is. 

Whether you saw him in the wash of memes that flooded the internet a couple years back, in his prolific porn credits, or on Youtube and TikTok, Johnny Sins is everywhere. He’s the most famous and sought-after male adult film actor, with a decade in the biz under his belt. 

VICE caught up with the American star while he was in town for Sexpo Australia, to chat about sex in space, having multiple jobs, his key to eternal youth – and great sex – and, most importantly, what life is like for “the world’s most hardworking man”.

Johnny Sins: Oh, it feels great. Actually, the last time I was here was in 2019. I got to Sydney on Friday, so I had a nice day in the city on Saturday. I just went out and explored. It’s my first time in Sydney. 

Well, welcome! I've just got a bunch of questions. Some of them are stupid, but c’est la vie. Did you always know you were going to be famous?

No, not at all. I kind of never really set out to be famous or even wanted to be famous. Even whenever I started doing porn, I never expected to have this level of notoriety, I guess. 

What do you think was the thing that blew you up? Are there any key moments in your career that you can identify where you started blowing up?

I think it's when the memes started coming out about all the jobs that I had. That was really the moment when I went from ‘porn performer, adult guy’ to sort of more ‘internet personality’. A lot of people started recognising me and I got more popular just based on the memes and not necessarily on porn. It reached a whole new audience, basically, beyond the porn audience.

And the youth as well… Definitely Gen Z. It's so hard to capture the attention of the Gen Z audiences but you did it.

My YouTube was very popular with Gen Z. And now my TikTok, of course, is very popular. So, I don't know how I became, like, looked up to from that generation. But here we are.

Do you have a favourite meme that you're starring in? Personally?

I think just the original one with the six jobs listed. The ‘this guy can do anything: doctor, lawyer, teacher, plumber, astronaut’. I think those are my favourites. 

The classics. I really like your TikTok. How did you go about managing your account on top of the other work that you do?

Well, TikTok, I started that at the beginning of quarantine, sort of like everybody else jumped on TikTok at that time. And the first video I did just kind of blew up. I don't necessarily spend a lot of time on TikTok now, mainly because I can't really promote anything on it. So it kind of just became a platform. Ironically, it's my biggest platform. I think I have almost 8 million followers on it now.

Your content is very PG. But TikTok is super notorious for censoring people that work in the sex industry, they love it. Have you faced many challenges since you've been using the app with censorship?

Of course, everyone has on TikTok. For me, I won't even talk about OnlyFans or mention OnlyFans. I try to keep it strictly PG. Also, I haven't been verified. So there's certainly some sort of discrimination going on there with the verification. So, especially not being verified, I have to be very careful what I say.

Do you think you show a different side of your personality on TikTok, as opposed to in your other work?

Yes. And I think that's why it's so popular. That’s what people want to see: your personal life, or how you are day-to-day, because the fans always tell me they think I'm based on my adult scenes. They think I'm this alpha male, but when they talk to me or see me on my YouTube channel, they're like, ‘oh, you're actually kind of a cool guy, somebody that I would hang out with’. 

Over the course of your career, I guess the industry has changed a lot, and with OnlyFans exploding, it's sort of like a democratisation of porn. Would you agree with that?

It definitely took the power away from the companies and into the hands of performers, and suddenly, the companies are offering us all kinds of money. Before, it was hard to even get lunch on set when you were a performer, the companies were being very, very cheap. But now that performers can shoot their own scenes, put them on OnlyFans and make really good money off of that, the companies now are basically competing with OnlyFans to get us on set. So that definitely helped us out. 

It's been interesting, because it's made porn, adult work, very mainstream. You don't even have to say you do porn anymore. You just say you do OnlyFans and everybody knows what you mean. So it's really changed everything for us. When I started, you just had to rely on the companies. And if something happened, if you were sick, you got injured, the business shut down for whatever reason, you weren’t making any money. 

So now it's completely different. If I shoot a scene today, I can basically sell it for the rest of my life.

It's pretty cool that you've had so many jobs – doctor, teacher, firemen, etc. Do you have a favourite role that you've played?

I think doctor is my most popular role. And I think it's the opposite of what I really do. So I suppose I really like playing a doctor, I don't know why. I would say astronaut, but I've never really been an astronaut yet. I'm still waiting for the space thing to happen.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Speaking of that, I was going to ask you, you were supposed to be the first performer to have sex in space. Is that still a dream of yours?

It would be very cool. I would love to be the first performer in space. And when that campaign launched, I don't even know when that was, 2015 maybe, no one had even gone to space yet on these commercial flights. But now that it's happening, it could be potentially realistic. I think it'd be awesome. It has to happen pretty quick, in the next couple of years, because I'm gonna get up there in age, so…

Ah, there’s a ticking time clock. We gotta get Elon Musk on board, obviously.

I think Elon would get on board with it, too. He is the type. That would be an amazing promotion for SpaceX, actually.

That’s a free idea, you can take it. Do you have any life advice for young people?

What I tell people to do is, follow your heart and what you want to do, not what everyone is telling you you should do. People always ask me for career advice, because of my jobs. And I would just say: whatever it is you love to do, just do that. You can make a career off anything these days. You don't have to work for somebody or work for companies, you can just do whatever you love. And you can be very successful at it.

I was wondering what is the wildest place that you have had sex, location wise, even outside of porn, outside of acting?

During a scene, I think the wildest place was probably in a helicopter. We were flying around. It was very interesting, because according to the FAA rules you have to have your seatbelt on no matter what. So the pilot wouldn't let us take our seatbelts off. It was a pretty small helicopter. So we were kind of side by side, but we just kind of took off the shoulder belt. And I think we got in three or four positions in this helicopter flying around. That was a really amazing experience. 

Other than that, my partner Kissa and I, we started our company by just taking a GoPro and having sex on vacation – at the beach or in the pool or risky places like that. And that's some of my best content, where I've had the most fun is just on vacation, filming.

Do you prefer that? The unscripted, kind of like ‘let's just go’ style?

Yeah, I do like that, now. I used to like the acting style and the intros in the beginning. But these days I would rather just set up a camera and have sex.

That sounds fun. Do you have a super high libido? 

Yeah, I always have. For ten years, I've shot as much as possible, like six days a week. I still have a really high libido. I always say to be successful in the business, you have to be somewhat addicted to it. Because it's just day in and day out. And it can be a grind, if you look at it as a job, but for me, I would be trying to have sex anyway, every day. 

So I might as well go to work and get paid for it. I would schedule a day off and be like, ‘this is stupid. I still want to have sex’.

‘I could be getting paid right now’

Exactly.

That's great. That's really the definition of ‘do what you love’.

I also think having sex daily or at least masturbating daily keeps you very young. Because you're sort of tricking your body, because we're here to reproduce, basically, that's like our whole purpose. So I think once you stop doing that, I think it triggers your body into saying, ‘okay, we don't need you anymore, it's time to get old’. If you’re having sex, or at least having an orgasm every day, you're telling your body ‘everything's still working, you've got to stay young, you’ve got to reproduce’.

Johnny Sins’ key to eternal youth: sex a day keeps the doctor away. Love it. And what do you think is the key to great sex?

The key to great sex, I think, at least for me, is concentrating on your partner and not yourself. So many girls tell me these days that guys are very selfish during sex, like they're all about themselves, they really just want to get themselves off. Where, I'm the opposite. I want to make you come 20 times before I even think about it. And I think that's what makes great sex.

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