Fresh Faces: Penny Archer

"I started doing sex work when I was in grad school," Penny Archer says. "I was escorting when I was working on my doctorate, and then—a bunch of crazy things happened in life and I decided that would be a more fun full-time gig." She left her doctoral program in the East with a year to go—“I had a master’s in clinical psychology. It freaked everyone out”—and moved to Los Angeles. She was nude modeling for Suicide Girls, a good choice with her full-body tattoos ("All nature images, all black and white.") She then started making my own videos and selling them on OnlyFans and ManyVids. It was actually really fun and I decided I may as well go for it." Those tattoos caught the eye of director Axel Braun, who shot the newbie for Wicked Pictures—appropriately enough, for his Inked series.  “I shot one of Penny’s first scenes for Axel Braun’s Inked 6”and she was fantastic,” the AVN Award-winning helmsman said. “A gorgeous and very classy girl, with some of the best ink I’ve ever seen. Her chemistry with Ryan Mclane was great and her performance was very intense. You would never know she was pretty much new in the business.” Archer prefers shooting for producers to making her own content. "It’s a lot of work, editing and managing and selling all that content. I'd rather show up, and shoot something and leave and get paid for it." Then it's their problem? "Exactly," she says with a smile. Archer also has shot for Skye Blue and Cherry Pimps, and likes "the cool people" she's met in the adult industry. "The industry attracts a lot of unusual characters. You have to be off the beaten path of life to end up here. For me, ‘interesting’ is the most important quality in a human, and the industry never disappoints." She collects mid-century modern furniture, "including George Nelson clocks" and reading "classic dystopian sci-fi novels" like George Orwell's 1984 and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.