Helly Hellfire, whose nom de porn suggests she’s going to burn down your house, blight your crops, and steal your wife, is actually far more complicated; she’s an amiable and business-minded performer who is grateful to be alive, working, and negotiating the Good Problem to Have of two oft-misunderstood careers: Porn performer and DJ.
She talks to me via a hands-free device while driving to the set of Seymore Butts’ “GoldShow.”
Grams: Most people are DJs like they are bartenders, and the same is true of people who think they can be porn performers…
Helly Hellfire: People think you just turn your iPod on. It’s not like that at all. Being a turntableist —
Grams: A what?
Hellfire: — a turntableist requires you to split your ears. You actually have to train your ears to hear two different things. My right ear is listening to the music coming out of the speaker and my left ear is on the headphones, to the music cueing up.
Grams: This is why every DJ has that picture holding up half a set of headphones. I thought that was like people who only wear their backpacks on one shoulder just to look cool.
Hellfire: It’s called a “trainwreck” if the beats from one song don’t match with the other. Learning to split your ears that way is like learning math. So No, it’s not like turning on your iPod.
Hellfire, a native Canadian, moved to Los Angeles nine years ago. She says she partied a lot, but she has cooled down.
“I spent the first three years in L.A. yelling at traffic,” she says. “But now I’m working on being a more centered and better person, and I find I don’t yell as much anymore.”
In Canada, Hellfire was a trained dancer from age 3 and performed in high school theatre. Later she danced at the Brass Rail in Toronto and did some nude modeling. “I had a lot of jobs in my twenties,” she says.
After moving to L.A., she picked up her name while performing with an industrial metal group at places like Boardner’s Bar Sinister fetish nights.
“Our schtick was vampire killbilly rednecks,” she says. “I was a poltergeist named Hellie Mae, after Ellie Mae Clampett.”
Thus her first porn scenes were performed under the moniker Hellie Mae Hellfire, but she has since dropped the Mae and added a nice solid Y.
Grams: I know some people do not see a transition from stripping to porn, but others do. What made you decide to jump in?
Hellfire: Porn came about when I was single and needed some job flexibility. It seemed like a symbiotic relationship. You know, I was extroverted anyway, and I don’t feel impeded by that performance.
Grams: On your website, I Am Hellywood, you don’t shy away from mentioning your adult work, like starring in “This Ain’t Lady Gaga XXX,” but you say “the film industry” instead of “porn.” On the other side, your DJ pictures certainly aren’t conservative, but you don’t market yourself as “the porn DJ.”
Hellfire: Yeah, there’s DJs who perform topless, and I won’t do that. It seems like a cheap sellout for me. It’s a fine line, but there can be a drawback to DJing if people perceive it as a too-sexualized thing. They forget that it’s both a skill and a performance.
Grams: Like porn?
Hellfire: Exactly. It’s easy to forget that it’s a performance being put on by people who know what they’re doing.
I’ve seen Hellfire in exactly two movies, and she lives up to her name in both of them. But it’s a controlled chaos. Similarly, her DJ career seems to have blossomed alongside her porn one, but she is nowhere near as porny compared to some of her contemporaries in her approach to that gig.
Hellfire is composing music for her first EP and is working with violinist/vocalist Shenkar, who has toured with Peter Gabriel and collaborated with Wendy and Lisa on the soundtrack to the TV show “Heroes.”
Hellfire doesn’t seem in the mood to be “the next Jenna Jameson,” as was the common porn ambition (at least until Jameson returned to adult work last month), but has gently nudged both careers with the leverage of the other. One high-profile gig was DJing for this year’s AVN Awards, and she will be further gaining exposure for her DJ work as part of the cast of Seymore Butts’ “GoldShow,” a new camhouse collaboration with Streamate from the “Family Business” star and featuring Hellfire, Mari Possa, Sophie Dee, and Angela Sommers.
Grams: How have the recent shutdowns in porn affected your work?
Hellfire: I’ve been very fortunate in that I had started camming, and then was offered “GoldShow.” It’s great exposure, and the work we’re doing is not anything the shutdown affected.
“Helly is a fucking firecracker,” says “Gold Show” and “Family Business” character Cousin Stevie, “and she’s a real hard worker.”
“GoldShow” is like a web-only continuation of Showtime’s “Family Business.” The extended Glasser family has aged, but is still the same. It is set to debut October 14.
Noting that camming and DJing offer a kind of control — and a barrier — that is exceptional for porn performers, I wonder if the shutdowns have turned her into a girls-only/solo performer.
Grams: Did you dodge a bullet?
Hellfire: Maybe. This series has gotten 40 thousand views already; whatever I do, it’s really good to be working.
See also: Helly Hellfire, Goldshow
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