This feature article appears in the March 2025 issue of X3 magazine, dedicated to capturing the genuine personalities, passions, and stories of emerging and established stars. X3 is published by XBIZ Media.
The photo shoot is going great. Anna Claire Clouds knows all her angles. The moment the cap comes off the camera lens, Clouds tilts her head just so and deploys her signature dreamy eyes with all controls set to “smoldering.” Girl knows what she’s doing.
Not just as a model, either. The newly crowned 2025 XMAs Performer of the Year has also art-directed her X3 magazine cover shoot, and the aesthetics are of the now: bedazzled pansexual country royalty. The soundtrack for the photo shoot has been arranged accordingly: Chappell starts us off at the Pink Pony Club, Cowboy Beyoncé Texas holds us, and Miley gets her own damn flowers, all while the Nashville-born-and-raised ACC — glimmering and bejeweled in a white cowboy hat and matching boots, surrounded by namesake clouds — goes on a-posing, serving up 2025 glam Americana with an open mind and heart.
“For me, to be truly loved is to be seen,” Clouds confides during our wide-ranging interview, granted to X3 during a rare short break in her go-go-go schedule, carefully arranged and monitored by super-agents to the adult stars Mark Spiegler and his trusty George. “So I would like to be truly seen by my fans. I would like them to know me as a person, on a much deeper level than just ‘blonde girl, tattoo, big ass.’ My main goal is to truly show who I am, not just what I do.”
Between photo setups, Clouds meets and greets industry visitors with her relaxed, perfectly modulated, imperial Southern charm. At one point, the conversation touches on her pre-porn entrepreneurial streak, during which she founded and ran a few businesses.
“Wait, how old are you?” asks one of the surprised insiders.
“I’m 30,” Clouds replies with the nonchalance of someone who’s tackled the subject on the reg. “I look younger, I know.”
When Clouds started shooting studio porn five years ago, she was slotted in numerous “teen” shoots and scenarios. She found it funny to watch people’s reactions when they saw her ID.
“When they saw me online, they assumed I was some young, dumb girl with a big tattoo,” she recalls. “But then I’d get there and they’d realize I’m educated, ready and aware, able to shoot a scene with no cuts and give the best performance that I can possibly give every single time.”
Clouds’ work ethic lends a Horatio Alger, heartland quality to her self-fashioning. She is the real deal: unpretentious and warm, she has the values and work ethic, and if the world can only see her, they’ll love her. The self-empowerment anthems of the current country glam divas booming all around us at the shoot are on the nose. This is Girl Power Reloaded, and the women wielding it embrace sexuality (in the broadest sense) and diversity, and also the gospel of the unstoppable power of working-class, red-white-and-blue self-worth and enterprise.
“It’s consistency and reliability that got me where I am,” Clouds continues. “That’s something that I’ve always really valued. And I know that this industry values it as well, because people pay a lot of money to shoot these things. If my job is to show up and get pretty and fuck, then I got that.”
Some serious thought went into her decision to wait until she was 25 to join the demanding, sink-or-swim world of studio porn.
“I wanted to make sure that I was ready for the commitment,” she says. “I knew that it meant waking up at 7 a.m. and doing two or three extra, last-minute replacement shoots that were not scheduled, every single week. That’s how you get to where I am. To ‘be on top,’ that’s not really necessarily the way my brain works. I’m not a very competitive person. But I have always known, from the start, that if I love what I do and I just keep working, I will receive opportunities that I want to receive, and that’s enough for me.”
Growing Up Among ‘Bless Your Heart’s
“I’ve always gravitated toward like-minded individuals, especially when it comes to sex and exploration and the way I look at life,” Clouds reflects about her upbringing. “I always seemed to find people that are similar when it comes to that, even in my small, little hick town near Nashville.”
The environs of Nashville, Tennessee in the late 1990s and early 2000s was not culturally the “Old South” by any stretch of the imagination. We are talking Taylor Swift’s country era, the Atlanta takeover of hip-hop, the battle to legalize ever-present weed, and the carnivalesque, anything-goes world of electronic and dance music festivals becoming a rite of passage for throngs of alternative-minded boys and girls — though all coexisting with the same repressive, phony-genteel and hella problematic bullshit that can be found anywhere in America, just with a special, historical flavor south of Mason-Dixon.
“I mean, we are in the Bible Belt,” Clouds notes. “But I just kind of always found people like me. I was lucky. It was a gift. It’s beautiful to be able to find people who are like you and to be able to enjoy life in the way that you see it should be enjoyed. Life is about experience. We’re just little meat sacks walking around and trying. The only point of all of this is to experience it. There’s nothing else that we’re supposed to be doing other than experience.”
Wherever Clouds took her particular — not too shabby — meat sack, be it music festivals, school, college, random jobs, she says she’s always found her like-minded tribe. This helped inoculate her against a particularly Southern brand of sweet-tea poison, the backhanded compliment full of social censure wrapped in a gilded turd of faux concern.
“I got really good at ignoring the judgmental voices,” she laughs. “I mean, after 20 or 30 ‘Bless your heart’s, what can you do? Because ‘Bless your heart’ is not a nice thing. They’re saying ‘Bless your heart’ because they think you’re dumb. I learned how to deal with that long before I even found out who I was, because that’s kind of what Tennessee is: subtle judgment and moral code-checks. It did create me as the person that I am today, and I have a wonderful set of morals, but they are not judgmental. I was myself, and the people that didn’t like it found an appreciation for it. There were a lot of things they learned from me, and I think that’s absolutely one of the best outcomes that could have come from growing up in a place like that.”
The music festivals popping up all over the South offered Clouds opportunities to make some money, notch up mind-expanding experiences and revel with a higher concentration of artistically-minded outsiders.
“I used to go-go dance for a lot of heavy-bass music — like a cage-type thing,” she reminisces. “Or I would spin fire, or spin lights or something along those lines. Especially at smaller festivals — they are really fun and interesting, like three or four-day festivals with camping. I danced with a troupe for a long time. It was a very fun job. I still keep in touch with them.”
Go-go dancing also came in handy for one of her early forays into sex work.
“I’ve stripped,” she laughs. “I’ve definitely stripped, and am still feature-dancing now. Those women are amazing. They should be brokers, to be completely honest, because these girls are the best with money. I know a few strippers in Vegas that work at some of the best clubs there, and I’ve never met a girl that is better with money and math than those women.”
Clouds says she still likes club work mainly because she truly loves dancing, particularly onstage.
“I also love the pleaser shoes,” she adds. “They’re amazing.”
While Cloud’s festival explorations were keeping her body on point, she was applying her mind to studying music business and psychology at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro.
“I love learning,” she says. “I learned a lot about advertising, entertainment in general, so much about business — things that have been invaluable in my adult career. I also learned a lot from talking to people in the music industry, before they get jaded and worn down.”
Clouds says that growing up around Nashville, one can’t help but run into the music industry.
“I have people in my family that are audio engineers and some of the best of the best,” she says. “In Nashville, there are several schools that you can go to and get a wonderful music education, it’s just that type of place. I like music in general, but Nashville is one of those places, where if you’re trying to go and be seen, there are so many incredible people there, you’ll be singing at a bar for the rest of your life. Go to Atlanta instead!”
Also adding to the impending sense that she had to leave her hometown in her 20s was Clouds’ realization that Nashville has become “a tourist trap.”
Before leaving Tennessee, Clouds crossed off one last “Country Capital of America hot girl” rite of passage.
“Yeah, I modeled,” she shares. “I did commercial campaigns for small stores and stuff like that — and of course, country music videos. Mostly I did background work, but I did co-star in a pretty big one.”
Go to YouTube and search for Lucas Hoge’s “Boom Boom.” Yup, that’s a barely recognizable ACC in 2017, a few years before she started on her porn journey, playing Hoge’s love interest — the girl with whom he wants to “drive until we fly” so he can make her feel “just like the Fourth of July.” Kudos to the director of photography who managed to include some pretty sweet shots of Clouds in them 2010s country “painted-on jeeeeeeeans,” showcasing an asset that porn fans would become obsessed with a few years later.
The brand-new XMAs Performer of the Year is amused about this pre-fame mainstream easter egg.
“You know, I used to hate country music when I was a kid,” Clouds admits. “It was played in all the grocery stores, so it was like elevator music to me. But now when I go back, I kind of like it. I didn’t really get an appreciation for country until I became an adult and moved out here. It’s very nostalgic.”
Go West,Young Woman
Before plunging into the Los Angeles and porn of it all, however, Clouds took a short detour to a more chilled-out environment.
“I went to Colorado for a couple years for funsies,” she says. “The draw was winter sports — I wanted to be where the snow was. And I really liked legal marijuana! I liked the whole Colorado vibe, I had several friends and some family there and it wasn’t as expensive as LA.”
In Colorado, Clouds continued stripping and exploring online sex work, including premium Snapchat, OnlyFans, her own website and a stint at camming — “Not for me,” she says. But she was just biding her time until she felt ready to take the plunge into porn, which she had intimately felt was her destined vocation ever since the day back in Tennessee when she ordered a vibrator from the Adam & Eve website.
“They said ‘discreet shipping,’” she laughs. “So I ordered it, and my parents were like, ‘What is this?’ And I was like, ‘Nothing. Don’t worry about it. It’s a box.’ So I took it upstairs, and the vibrator came with a bunch of free DVDs, older titles. Big bush and hairdos era. That did it. I became a fan of porn history through those DVDs, and I’ve been a fan of classic porn ever since. There was a cheerleader thing, a bunch of random stuff. I would, of course, masturbate, but then I would really watch them and try to learn as much about it as I could. I’d be like, ‘Must be hard to get that type of angle. How do they do that?’ It was very interesting to me.”
As a budding porn fan, Clouds gravitated to strong performers and began developing her personal tastes.
“I like a lot of girl-girl, I like anal, I always like gangbangs,” she says. “I loved the Kink.com stuff when they did “Public Disgrace.” Mona Wales! Incredible. Oh my god, absolutely one of the best.”
Core members of her personal hall of fame include Kissa Sins, Tera Patrick, Bonnie Rotten, and Lea Lexis.
“I loved Lea Lexis as a performer,” she gushes. “Especially when she used to do girl-girl, with one of them being more dominant and one more submissive. You should watch her! She’s an absolutely incredible performer. I truly admire her.”
After becoming a performer herself, Clouds got to work for Lexis — now a producer, director and team lead behind the scenes for Brazzers and Digital Playground — and couldn’t help fangirling on her.
“Lea was a little shy when I told her what her videos meant to me,” Clouds says. “I get it, she is an absolutely incredible director, and that’s what she’s known for. But for me, I’ve known Lea Lexis since before I got in, and in my personal world, she’s a force, an absolute force.”
Another figure who towered over her personal porn pantheon would eventually become a colleague and mentor.
“I can’t overstate how much of a huge, huge fan of Angela White I was before getting into porn,” Clouds stresses. “I’ve always loved Angela White, and will forever. Her dirty talking is… significant. It’s something to study.”
Clouds finally decided to take the plunge into studio porn after moving to Las Vegas. The good news: porn wanted Anna Claire Clouds too. The bad news: it was early 2020.
“I knew that this was where I wanted to be,” she affirms. “I got my first agent. I did literally two scenes, and then…” Cue record scratch. “COVID hit. Lockdown.”
Undaunted, the enterprising Clouds weathered the pandemic doing online work.
“That period just allowed me to focus on where I wanted to be once it was over,” she says. “I also wrote and directed one remote scene for Adult Time. So I kept myself busy.”
As COVID restrictions came and went in chaotic fashion, Clouds doubled down on her work ethic.
“In the beginning, it was hard,” she reminisces. “I had a lot of fill-in shoots. That was my bread and butter, a chance to show directors, producers and other talent who I was. I got to work for almost every big company. I would be tested and available and awake at 7 a.m. every day, always aware that if I got a call, I needed to show up.”
That go-getter attitude led to all kinds of gigs, including unusual mainstream opportunities like a horror feature about a cursed VHS videotape — search Tubi for “Videoverse” (aka, “Cassex”) to catch Clouds’ side quest as a scream queen — but her main focus remained getting industry gatekeepers to notice her.
“Other than people like Mike Quasar, who always believed in me, with every big company that you could think of, I had to prove that I was somebody that was going to show up and give my best,” she recalls. “I knew that if I did that three, four times in a row, that’s when things would really change.”
And then there was “the tattoo.”
By the time of the COVID pandemic, the industry’s attitude toward tattoos had begun to evolve, mirroring changes in society at large. Performers with significant ink were able to get regular bookings and foster careers beyond the “alt model” niche. Nevertheless, “the tattoo” — an impossible-to-miss, impossible-to-shoot-around piece on Clouds’ sternum, with solar and planetary symbols honoring her family and childhood home — was definitely a thing, at least initially.
“It’s a big tattoo!” she laughs. “I was very worried about it early on because I understand the history of porn. But the flowers for this change go to incredible women and performers like Bonnie Rotten and Joanna Angel. Before I ever met them, I was watching them actively and I always thought they were incredible performers. After I showed my value two or three times for companies, they stopped looking at the tattoo.
“Also, there is now a different type of appreciation in society for what the attainable ‘girl next door’ might be like,” she observes. “I think I happen to fit the mold of both an ‘alt’ performer and also the girl next door.”
Here’s how Anna Claire Clouds describes herself and her work persona: “not too big of a ditz, that ass, very smooth, youthful-looking face and blonde hair.”
“If I were to go dark hair, really dark eyes, super tan, if I were to switch the whole thing up, then it might not hit the same,” she reflects. “So I think that it just so happens to be lucky for me that I have the features that I have, even with the tattoo that I have. But Bonnie and Joanna made me do this. Before I ever met them, I was watching them actively and I always thought they were incredible performers.”
Clouds’ strategy to deal with the issue, once again, was that work ethic.
“After I showed my value two or three times for companies, they stopped looking at the tattoo. And that’s how I got in with all of them. I watched interviews with Bonnie and Joanna and they did the same thing. So that’s where I got that from. I knew that was what I had to do, and that’s what I did when I started.”
Fast-forward to 2025. The freaking Performer of the Year has an epic sternum piece. Deal with it.
The Meaning of Porn
Back at the X3 cover shoot, Clouds is immortalized in her XMAs Performer of the Year glory by noted photographer, Siren Obscura.
Obscura has experience making Clouds look glamtastic, as she is one of Gamble’s go-to performers to convey intensity and intimacy. That “most hardcore girl-next-door” thing that’s one of the top draws in this era of the industry and which Clouds naturally dominates.
“I’m not a great liar,” Clouds reflects during a break in the shoot. “I learned very quickly, from the start, that I need to be comfortable with showing exactly who I am, because hiding is not my strong suit.”
Clouds’ commitment to authenticity makes her a popular figure with fans at X3 Expo and other conventions.
“The people that go to those conventions have been following me since the very beginning,” she shares. “They’re just like me: hard-working people that are normal and great and freaky and fun — classic humans! They come and talk to me about the things that I’ve done this year with such enthusiasm. It’s such a wonderful type of support. I really do appreciate them. It’s a very special, ongoing thing we have. They are just such fun perverts!”
This reflection leads Clouds into deeper thoughts, not on the meaning of life but the meaning of porn.
“You know, a lot of people who watch my videos might not even know my name, which is totally okay by me, because I do understand what porn is,” she says. “Porn is not just selling sex online. It is advocating for desire.”
She pauses a moment, letting the notion sink in.
“It’s creating something in someone that they might not be able to experience on their own without some type of material that creates desire and satisfaction in a very primal way,” she continues. “Porn is fulfilling desire and satisfaction in people, in a very easy, fun form of entertainment. I’ve never thought it was anything other than that, because I’ve been single a lot of my life, and porn has been a wonderful way of reminding me of my sexual drive when I might not have been fucking as much as I wanted to.”
Ask many of the current crop of performers, digital natives in their 20s and 30s whose sexuality is inextricable with the online adult content revolution, and you’ll hear many statements echoing Clouds. For many of them, access to adult content led to discovering deep truths about their sexual selves, in ways unthinkable for earlier generations.
“You need to check out Czech Glory Holes,” Clouds enthuses when queried about her personal predilections. “Czech Glory Holes is really, really good porn. I’d love to go shoot in Prague, but I just keep getting my schedule filled up here. I like a good realistic porn. I wish Kink still did that type of stuff.”
To her everlasting regret, Clouds just missed the era of the San Francisco Armory, aka the Kink Castle, by a few years.
“I’d have thrived at the castle!” she laments, eyes getting dreamy in a different, less rehearsed way than during the photo shoot. “I would have been in-cre-dible.”
The Kink Castle era looms large over Clouds’ 2024 showcase, the suitably titled “Dark Side.”
“That era of kink is what Jules Jordan set up for me with my gangbang for ‘Dark Side,’” she explains. “I just wanted to be brainless and have as much fun as I possibly could.”
What she calls “that European feel” — rough, anonymous-seeming, amateurish, senses-obliterating — really does it for her.
“I am a huge fan of Rocco Siffredi’s,” she gushes. “I just watched all of the ‘Super Sex’ biopic series about his life, on Netflix. I’d love to shoot for Rocco. He is like a bucket-list item for sure.”
Two other bucket-list items were already checked off in the course of shooting “Dark Side.”
“My gangbang and my DP with Jules and Zach Wilde are my favorite sex scenes I’ve done,” she says with pride. “Those were first-time sexual experiences for me as an adult woman. I mean, fantasy unlocked!
“My DP is a beautiful piece of work, and it’s shot incredibly,” she elaborates. “Elliot, the camera guy, he just absolutely freaking killed it. I wouldn’t have changed a single thing about it. As somebody who enjoys true gonzo, I don’t even know how they did it. It’s so open, you really have a beautiful view of what I was experiencing. I wasn’t performing, really. It was so great.”
Though “Dark Side” did not win the coveted Best Showcase statuette at the 2025 XMAs, Clouds doesn’t mind in the least, as there is no bigger fan of the title that did take the award — a title in which she is featured as a scene partner.
“Angela White’s ‘Fuck Angela’ is a piece of art,” she fangirls. “I’m so, so, so glad it won Best Showcase. I think it’s one of the best movies I’ve ever seen in my life. It is a precedent for what showcases can and should be. There’s nothing like it. It shows not just the glitz and glamour, but the behind-the-scenes. Like I said, ‘To be seen is to be loved,’ and in that movie, she really lets us see her.”
The scene Clouds and White shared was shot by industry legend John Stagliano.
“It was so fun!” Clouds recalls. “I’d watch John’s Buttman videos all the time, so it was like living a dream. It was everything I could have wanted. We shot it in his house studio in the Palisades — it was one of the last things to be shot there before it burned down in the fires. I’m forever thankful to Angela for including me.”
Shining Present, Shimmering Future
The photo shoot is wrapping up, having gone without a hitch, as expected. Clouds was early and ready and eager to be undeniable.
Undeniability has for over a century been the key to success in Los Angeles — which is to say, the key to success in global show business. You can be the best comedian, or the hottest fashion model, or the most acclaimed actor in your town, but in L.A., as Chicago transplant Cameron Esposito once put it, in L.A. you ain’t shit.
The misguided cliché is that Los Angeles is superficial. It’s actually the opposite. In L.A., in this league of showbiz, surfaces don’t cut it. You gotta be in it to win it. All the time. No breaks. Undeniable.
Or as Performer of the Year Anna Claire Clouds puts it — you gotta be ready at 7 a.m., tested and demanding to be first pick for whatever booking a more slackerish hopeful just dropped.
“LA is where I live now, and I like it,” she says. “I find California as a whole beautiful. Earlier today, I was in Santa Monica and we went to this little market that was super cute, and then we went to a fun little Mexican restaurant right by the beach and walked down the beach. California has so much open air: if you go north for a while, it’s beautiful. If you go south, you can find some incredible vineyards. Most importantly, my knees don’t hurt! During rainy seasons in Tennessee, I used to get terribly bad knees. Here it rarely rains, so it’s perfect for me and my poor knees!”
With the 2025 XMAs Performer of the Year trophy in hand, Clouds is undeniably sitting at the top. So what’s in her future?
Clouds smiles.
“I’m just so used to the head-to-the-ground working, and that’s what I’m going to continue to do,” she concludes. “Since it’s so recent that I’ve won these awards, I’m not quite sure that it’s really hit me that I do have all of these opportunities — but I feel like very soon it will, because I am getting a lot of offers for incredible roles from absolutely amazing companies. My agents keep asking what I want to do and I’ve been sending them ideas, and they’ve said, ‘Yeah, we can absolutely make that happen. Every last bit of what you’re saying, we can make happen.’ So I think I’ll understand the depth of what I can achieve a little bit more with time. It’s just got to settle in still.”
Then she leaves us, her final words encapsulating everything that has gotten her where she is:
“I just love working.”
To view the full pictorial in X3 magazine, click here.
