Actors With X-Rated Pasts You Never Knew About

Every actor has to start out somewhere. Whether it be hocking McDonald's in a TV commercial, appearing in black box or community theater, or working as an extra on a film set, Hollywood's stars rarely burst fully-formed into the public's consciousness, ready for the limelight.

Sometimes they even get started in a much more ribald place. There's no shame in sex work, but many actors are understandably reluctant to share the fact that they posed nude when they were young and hungry, or that they participated in the filming of a softcore adult film.

That said, it's actually a much more common stepping stone to the big leagues than you'd think. Plenty of actors pitched woo, for instance, on "The Red Shoe Diaries," a softcore smutfest that helped David Duchovny break through before he landed "The X-Files." Anna Nicole Smith, Pamela Anderson, Sasha Grey, Jenna Jameson — notoriously or not, they all started out in projects that attained, at minimum, a single X-rating. But there are others with naked skeletons in their closets that you might not know about. Here's a listing of actors whose naughty pasts are slightly more obscure.

Desperate matters sometimes call for desperate actions, and Sylvester Stallone was homeless and hungry when he said yes to "The Party at Kitty and Stud's." It was a softcore smut film that took two days to shoot, but it eventually came back to haunt him when he hit the big time a few years later. "The Party at Kitty and Stud's" is a simplistic film that features the fractious relationship between the titular Kitty (Henrietta Holm) and her boyfriend — the also-titular Stud (Stallone). The plot revolves around their infighting and, eventually, the stranger-filled orgy they throw.

It's a little-known fact that Stallone was in dire straits when he shot the movie, and he didn't appreciate it when the film resurfaced once he was famous. "It was either do that movie or rob someone because I was at the end—at the very end—of my rope," Stallone said in an interview with Playboy Magazine in 1978. "Instead of doing something desperate, I worked two days for $200 and got myself out of the bus station." He alleges that the film's producers tried to sell "The Party at Kitty and Stud's" back to him, but when he scoffed at the offer, they released it as "The Italian Stallion," complete with a rousing theme song that sounds a whole lot like a certain familiar tune from Stallone's breakthrough role.

The film was subsequently hounded by rumors that Stallone performed unsimulated sex acts onscreen after it was recut, a notion debunked when AVN Magazine discovered that hardcore shots of other actors had been inserted into the footage. It's since been released on DVD and had its international rights auctioned off on eBay, giving it quite the afterlife despite Stallone's discomfort.

The Governator has never been one to be shy about his form — after all, he started out as a star in the bodybuilding world. But it turns out he also did a little bit of modeling for an entertainment magazine that didn't mind leaning in on the bare skin factor to sell some issues.

In 1977, Schwarzenegger was the subject of a pictorial titled "Musclebound for Glory" in the entertainment magazine After Dark. Though it wasn't originally marketed as a publication for gay men, After Dark had a heavily gay male-identified readership, and the publisher eventually leaned into its audience's interests. It occasionally featured cis male nudity in its pictorials, usually partially obscured. To wit, Schwarzenegger appears fully nude in the article, twice, with partial views of his penis on display.

All in all, the pictorial shows off about as much of Ahnuld as fans would see in a "The Terminator's" nude scene a few years later, which is probably why it's remained such an obscure part of his legacy. Plus, he had to deal with a much more upsetting situation around the same time when Schwarzenegger had footage of his bodybuilding posing spliced into a pornographic movie without his permission. The director had told him it was supposed to be part of a documentary, only to edit him into the X-rated film. Schwarzenegger was naturally upset by the incident, according to an interview with the actor's ex-girlfriend Barbara Outland Baker that was published by the San Francisco Gate.

Actor Simon Rex rocketed to fame as an MTV Veejay and has become a popular face in comedies like "Scary Movie 3," but he entered the entertainment industry in a surprising way — via pornographic films such as "Young, Hard, and Solo #2." Rex, who was working to help support his girlfriend and her child at the time, did the movies as a way to make ends meet. His then-girlfriend — a former Penthouse model who was already involved in the industry — helped hook him up with a director, and he shot several movies. The films stayed buried until MTV came knocking, after which several gossip columnists pointed audiences toward them.

Earning critical respect in the indie film "Red Rocket," Rex has stayed in touch with his comedy roots — and has had mixed things to say about his time in the adult industry. "At the time, I was so young and dumb that I thought it was cool. At 18, you don't make good decisions," he told The Guardian. A few months earlier, he had responded to a question about the films posed by an Uproxx critic by saying, "I'd rather just talk about this movie as that was 30 years ago. I mean, we could talk about Exxon Valdez too, or we could talk about the Iran-Contra thing, but I don't want to go backwards." And with the future ahead of him, is it any wonder why he wouldn't want to look back?

Of all of the actors who appear on this list, the legendary James Hong — still a working actor at the age of 95 — might be the most surprising name. But, yes, he did appear in an adult film. Though his role in the movie didn't involve him having sex, he appears as Y.C. Chan in the hardcore film "China Girl." He was billed as James Young for the part.

The plot sees Hong leading a syndicate that seeks to rule the world via sexual dominance, a plan they hope to achieve with a special serum. To that end, he has biochemist Teresa Hardgrave (Annette Haven) kidnapped and tortured using the serum, forcing her to cough up information about a secret formula that the American government is developing that enables the taker to have perfect and total recall. Agent David Chase (Tom Douglass) heads out in pursuit of Hardgrave — but can he save her before the serum drives her completely mad?

Hong has never publicly discussed the film, but when one considers how many movies he's been in — from "Flower Drum Song" to "Chinatown" to "Big Trouble in Little China" — it's hardly surprising that the movie might not be one he or his interviewers would choose to focus on. That said, it's still a fascinating curio in his long and storied career.

This one's a case of signing on for a project you think will be credible, highfalutin', and artistic — only to find yourself appearing in the film that Roger Ebert said "is not good art, it is not good cinema, and it is not good porn."

The film in question is 1979's "Caligula," which also features the acting talents of other famous faces like Malcolm McDowell, Peter O'Toole, and John Gielgud. In the movie, Dame Helen Mirren plays Caligula's (McDowell) wife, Caesonia. Notorious for it's backstage tussles between producer Bob Guccione and director Tinto Brass about the former filming and adding the movie's hardcore scenes at night, after the primary cast and crew left the set. (Brass ultimately demanded he not be credited as director, though he maintained his credit as its principal photographer.) It all makes the tale of the notoriously licentious emperor's life somehow even more lurid. Featuring unsimulated sex scenes between Penthouse Pets and other, non-famous actors, it ended up turning a tidy penny at the box office before being scuttled off to VHS. While Mirren doesn't perform in any of the X-rated scenes (apparently, some of the name actors were completely unaware that those hardcore moments existed until the movie was released), she does appear nude in the film. Her character also has a PG-13-rated threesome with Caligula and his real true love, his sister, Drusilla (Teresa Ann Savoy).

Dame Mirren — who has always been fairly fearless about sex and nudity onscreen — has actually maintained a sense of humor about the movie. She told People (via Vanity Fair), "Everyone was naked in that. It was like showing up for a nudist camp every day. You felt embarrassed if you had your clothes on in that movie." That's the spirit.

Plenty of actors have started their career out as models, but Cameron Diaz participated in one shoot she wanted the world to forget. In 1992, John Rutter shot pictures of the then-aspiring model in a risqué setting involving leather boots, toplessness, and a male model on a leash. While some of the photos were published in an overseas magazine, the topless images of Diaz and footage of the photoshoot were forgotten about until she became famous.

Rutter approached Diaz in 2003, asking if she wanted to buy them back for $3.5 million and giving her a two-day deadline to respond. Rutter said he was giving her first right of refusal before shopping them around. Diaz claimed that Rutter told her that he had prospective buyers on the hook who might use them in a smear campaign against her involving billboards and magazine spreads timed to be released close to the premiere of "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle." She took it as a blackmail threat after he refused to name the other party, turned him into the police, and sued him. He countersued, claiming fraud and breach of contract.

A two-week trial ensued in 2005, with Rutter claiming it was all a terrible misunderstanding. Even though he admitted that someone had forged her signature on a model release form he showed her, he insisted it wasn't him. The judge didn't buy it, and he was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail on charges of forgery, attempted grand theft, and perjury. On top of all of that, Diaz won an undisclosed amount of money from Rutter through her civil suit in 2006. The judge also dismissed Rutter's countersuit — and that's why you don't mess with an angel.