Interview: Carter Cruise on Twin Wins for New Starlet, Actress

This article originally ran in the March 2015 issue of AVN. To see the issue, which features coverage of AVN's January shows, click here. Talk about a formidable talent: Carter Cruise is the only Best New Starlet winner in AVN Awards history other than Jenna Jameson in 1996 to take Best Actress the same year. (And back then there were two Best Actress categories—one for film and one for video; Jenna won the latter for Wicked Pictures’ Wicked One.) Apparently going with an alliterative name was the right choice. While this accomplishment is certainly nothing short of momentous, for the indubitably ambitious Ms. Cruise, it’s simply an accelerated fulfillment of the grand plan she’s had mapped out for herself since day one of her career. “When I got in the industry, I made a yearly list of goals, and actually my goal for this year was Best New Starlet, and Best Actress was my goal for next year,” she explained. “Things have happened faster than I expected, which is just an awesome thing, but it’s a little bit overwhelming at the same time.” It should actually come as little surprise that Cruise proved herself as strong a thespian as she is a sexual performer right out of the gate. “The acting part was a huge reason of why I wanted to do porn,” she asserted. “I’ve been acting my whole life, and so when I was thinking about doing porn, I thought I wasn’t going to do it unless I could do it well, since obviously it’s a huge, life-altering decision, and the porn that I personally liked was the really cool features like Wasteland. That’s what had initially drawn me to porn in the first place. “So I was like, ‘I don’t want to be a waitress and do these little bit parts and maybe one day make it, I want to just act,’” she continued. “And that’s one thing that’s so cool about porn to me, is that every day I get to go to work and act, and maybe it’s not like real Hollywood acting, but I take it as seriously as I would if it was. And to me it’s just fun. It’s not about the prestige of being like, ‘Oh, I’m an actress.’ I just really enjoy it.” When the role came along that would go on to win her the 2015 AVN Best Actress trophy, in Jacky St. James and Eddie Powell’s Second Chances for New Sensations Romance, Cruise recounted, “I read the script and I was like, ‘This movie is going to be really good, and I think I can do a really good job with it.’ And I remember when we were on set, I was like, ‘Listen, we need to go over these lines now, because I’m going to win an award for this.’ I was super anal to everyone, like, ‘I want to film this again, I can do that better,’ because I had a really good feeling about that script. I didn’t honestly really expect to win, I was just hoping to get nominated and just kind of put myself on the map, but then the movie just turned out so awesome, I was like, ‘Maybe I will win.’” So since she’s now ahead of schedule on her career checklist, what does Cruise have in her crosshairs next? “Well this year I’m planning on doing everything I haven’t done,” she proclaimed. “I want to just do every kind of genre and fetish and type of scene there is out there, and really completely dominate all of it this year, because I want to get Performer of the Year next year. I have to skip ahead a year, because that was my plan for 2017.” To make our own projection, we’d say that by then, one of the more common refrains from the mouths of fresh-off-the-bus starlets will have become, “I want to be the next Carter Cruise.”