Congratulations are in order for former Disney/Boy Meets World star Maitland Ward after she was nominated for two awards – best-supporting actress and the best three-way sex scene – at this year’s coveted AVN Awards (basically the Oscars for porn).

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Maitland, 42, says she is making more money as a porn star than she ever did working for Disney, and this week told the Daily Beast how the career change came to be.

Ward, who played Rachel McGuire, the bombshell redhead obsession of both Eric (Will Friedle) and Jack (Matthew Lawrence), says her career transition to porn happened by chance. After “Boy Meets World” ended in 2000, she booked a few bit parts in Hollywood before moving on to study theater and screenwriting in New York and Los Angeles.

But in 2013, as a 30-something actress, she says she got her big break at comic conventions while dressed up in sexy cosplay, which she posted on social media — much to her team’s chagrin.

“I had a publicist who was like, ‘Stop putting up sexy pictures. They will not hire you for anything if you do that. Once you get past 30, 35, they don’t hire you for doing sexy stuff. You should be auditioning to play Disney moms,’” she says. “He thought he was giving me good advice, but it just wasn’t my thing. I was typecast. I was seen as a wholesome comedy star, and I was trying to fight against that. I didn’t want to play a Disney mom.”

Soon after, she discovered that her millions of Instagram fans wanted more, so she began selling adult content — including nude photos — online through a Snapchat premium account, porn app OnlyFans and content service Patreon.

“For 2018, I was the No. 1 adult-content creator for Patreon,” she says, “and it put the power back in my hands. Studios wouldn’t give me that.”

From cosplaying at comic conventions to Patreon to Snapchat to Onlyfans and then finally – porn. And to think she did it all while going against the wishes of her publicist and advisers who kept trying to cast her as a Disney mum because they thought she was too old to be sexy. Which just makes her porn star success story ever better.

The best part though is how much money she’s been making:

Ward tells The Daily Beast she makes as much as five figures a month on OnlyFans alone, snagging $62,000 in her best month during 2018.

$62k a month for sharing sexy pics of yourself on OnlyFans? Sign me up! From there she started filming actual porn scenes:

Soon after, she started doing girl-on-girl sex scenes on her premium Snapchat account, something she calls “just another kind of performance,” which led to her first feature porn role in “Drive.” She first announced her role in the 3½-hour “erotic thriller” on Instagram, where she posts a slew of X-rated photos.

Ward describes filming porn scenes as something that “feels natural.” Now that she’s the face of high-end XXX brand Deeper.com, she has no plans to slow down anytime soon and has several other porn projects in the works.

“It’s insane! At my age, to come in and become a porn star?” she says. “I don’t have a label either. I’m just this grown woman who loves sex. One thing I really like is to surprise people, to shock them and to get them stirred up. I’m going to keep doing that.”

But aside from the money, she’s glad to still have her “Boy Meets World” fans.

“They say, I’ve been masturbating to you all these years,” she says. “And you know, that’s a feat that I will be proud of.”

So there you have it. If you fancy getting into the porn industry why not test the waters as a sexy cosplayer first and then move on to Snapchat, Patreon and Onlyfans before making the inevitable jump into porn. Look at how things worked out for Maitland Ward!

The AVN Award winners will be announced at the end of January – best of luck to Maitland and all the other nominees.

P.S. Never forget:

To watch porn stars describe their grossest on-set experiences on camera, click HERE (NSFW).