“He’s not a model, he’s just here with me.” The next scene is another cliché: Simon Rex flies to Milan. The dialogue is so commonplace as to be cliché: “Who is he?”.
Accompanying his childhood sweetheart to a model casting, an agency director noticed him.
With the exception of porn, Simon Rex’s biography resembles that of many other photogenic young people in the right place at the right time. Red Rocket, which opens in Spain in May, has brought Rex - who at the height of his fame was a pretty face, in his decline a joke and during the last few years a pariah - some of the best reviews of the year, the award for best actor at the Independent Spirit Awards and, incidentally, a reconciliation with the murkiest part of his past. That Rex is talking again about the subject he avoided for years, as if it were an exorcism, is because he plays a porn actor in Red Rocket, the new film by Sean Baker, who in Tangerine (2015) or The Florida Project (2017) portrayed the dreams and hopes of the lumpen who survive behind the neon lights of Las Vegas or Disneyland. Rex thus became the epitome of the star born at the dawn of a new era, who has a hidden past that catches him by surprise: a new era in which nothing that has ever been recorded, written or said can be forgotten. That resulted in four tapes with not exactly cryptic titles ( Young, Hard and Alone, for example, or Hot Sessions I, II and III) which, when Rex became a celebrity in the United States, were re-released a few years later and saw the light of day thanks to the internet. Desperate to stay afloat, he answered an ad in a Los Angeles newspaper seeking models to pose nude. It started in 1993, when he was 19 years old and cleaning tables. Just two days before, gay porn star Armond Rizzo called out a studio for paying its sexually submissive performers less than their dominant scene partners, essentially creating a wage gap between tops and bottoms.Actor Simon Rex, 47, may be the last person in the history of Hollywood who believed he could shoot four porn movies, find fame and live in a world where this past wouldn’t come out. It was the second time in the same week that the gay porn industry was criticized by its actors for unfair practices. "Now that I am more experienced, I feel like a model should make no less than 1k." "When I started out I was making $500 per scene," said Nic Sahara. "Back when I worked for Boycrush we were only paid 400-500 per scene," one guy replied while another said that as recently as last year, he only received $300 for his first scene. "If you're a performer making less than 1k this isn’t me coming after you in any way," he said, "I just want everyone to realize what your worth instead of letting your studio decide for you."Ī number of models responded to the tweet, sharing just how much (or little) they were paid when they started out in the industry, citing specific studios who underpaid their performers. He clarified that he wasn't criticizing the models taking less money, but rather pointing out how studios might be exploiting their naivety. As performers can we go ahead and say that no one who is preforming for a studio should be getting paid any less than 1k a scene I hear about some of these new models scene rates and how multiple well known studios are knowingly taken advantage of young performers #1Kornothing- Joey Mills January 27, 2020