EDGE Interview: Stormy Daniels Heads to the DILF Mansion for Season 2 of OUTtv's Sleeper Hit

A few years ago, adult entertainment icon Stormy Daniels was living a real nightmare. Her life was in upheaval as she fought a team of Donald Trump lawyers over her allegations that she and the former president had an affair ten years before he took office. The circus surrounding that scandal and the attacks on her integrity about the whole thing had a lingering effect. So, in light of all that, her answer when approached by producers about doing an LGBTQ+ reality show was "I'm not interested." Her reason for declining was that her experience with those types of shows in the past was that they weren't actually "reality," and she wasn't going to participate in something orchestrated.

However, with some encouragement from her agent, Daniels re-considered and used fate (and persistence from the producers) as the deciding factor. It was the Saturday before Easter, "If they'll talk to me at this time tomorrow, I'll consider it," she told her manager, thinking the holiday would sabotage their pitch, but it didn't. They called. "And the rest is history," she says.

Daniels had just come off the 2022 reality show revival of VH1's "The Surreal Life" and was still reeling from the nature of her lawsuits before hosting the OUTtv dating reality series "For the Love of DILFs." Being authentic on TV was important and she wasn't going to compromise.

"I was just nervous that it would be like actually scripted and try to be 'fake is real' and be a therefore dishonest, which is something I need to avoid when I'm going to multiple trials about being honest," Daniels told EDGE. "Or that it would be like exploitive, you know, of the gay community. And that's the last thing I needed. I could see every version of terrible clickbait that this could have been."

But her fears were eased. The showrunners had come through on their promises of being authentic and Daniels had a great time hosting the show. "It was a help that the producers are gay. So, they are not stepping into this new arena of gay programming, try to capitalize on it, which is something I was also against. I had a really great time. They lived up to everything they said and exceeded all of my expectations. And also, it wasn't just frivolous reality TV."

"For the Love of DILFs" on OUTtv has become a sleeper hit for the unconventional streaming channel. Its second season starts on January 23 with weekly episodes in tow. The premise is simple: several older "daddies" date much younger men (called "Himbos") in an effort to find true love with Daniels as their mediator. They all live together in a mansion where they participate in challenges, go on dates and risk being eliminated by a group vote. It's standard stuff, but with an interesting gay May-December sexy twist, as well as a sexual openness missing from similar dating shows.

"It does have the drama and the laughs and the cheesiness sometimes and that's all good," Daniels says, "But it's also authentic; people aren't set up to fail. There's no ambushes, there's no scripting, there's no like pressure, there's no retakes. What you see is what you get like there's nobody being coached or scripted, which I have seen on other shows, and I didn't want any part of that."

Despite all the realness, Daniels wasn't expecting to find herself engrossed in the conversations between the participants of the first season, some of their topics, she says, were important and impactful. "We had real conversations about consent and boundaries, bullying and sex positivity."

The last issue came up on Season One when Tony Cannoli, one of the younger contestants, had an issue with DILF Alex Tikas, with whom he was attracted to. The issuec came when Alex told him he was a successful adult male star and had no shame about being a sex worker. In the end, Cannoli couldn't deal with dating an adult star and they were not a match. But it easy to understand how Daniels related to this meme.

"That was an unexpected happy bonus that made me very, very excited when the show did well. And we got picked up and we filmed season two and now we are a couple months away from filming season three."

As a host, Daniels is a great go-between for the participants partly because she considers herself a very intuitive person. Knowing which personalities are going to click helps determine how well the chemistry works. But that innate skill doesn't just come from being in the adult entertainment business for almost 30 years, there might be some unseen forces at work. Daniels is also involved in the paranormal and does readings for people.

"And so I have that extra instinct or intuition if you will," she contends. "You can never predict how someone's going to react sometimes. There were some explosions that I didn't see coming, I gotta be honest about that one. But I wasn't put in the position as a host just because I'm used to being ostracized and marginalized for my career, for my gender, or for speaking up, at the same time, I come from the adult industry where people, the adult performers or film stars are at their most vulnerable. I mean, I saw my butt hole on a jumbotron."

One thing that Daniels couldn't predict was when Tikas decided to exit the show on his own on Episode 3 of the first season. In that episode, Daniels gets pretty upset vocally on-camera about the departure, not because the guy had a diva moment, and not because she has become emotionally invested in him, but because he lost out on something that could have been special.

"To be quite honest, I was gonna get paid either way," she says. "I get paid whether they all leave or all stay. It was really about watching him waste an opportunity and let it pass him by. The thing that I've learned the most over the last almost six years now, dealing with all the things I've been dealing with is that there's never enough time, like when you leave this earth and go wherever we go --- when we go --- the one thing that people always wish they had more of is time. And I was angry at the situation because I felt like they were wasting an opportunity and they're wasting my time. I, instead of standing there for something that, in my opinion, they thought didn't matter, I could have been at home with my kids."

Viewers may notice some changes this season. Most television shows, especially reality TV, use their first seasons as a kind of trial run. Showrunners learn what works and what doesn't and adjust accordingly thereafter. Even though the show is unscripted, there are writers and other creatives who help with Daniel's hosting, penning her intros and rules for the challenges.

But Daniel's emphasizes that now that the training wheels are off, Season 2 is more streamlined which allows her some freedom to be more creative. "I think overall in a nutshell, it was the comfort ability, you know? We know each other now; all that awkward first date stuff is gone."

Daniel's still keeps in touch with some of the men from the show's first season. She saw Charles Moriarty one night while she was at a gay nightclub in London and she and Bobby Knight talk regularly. Even on the new season, one of the himbos is an ice skater and invited Daniels and her daughter to one of his shows.

"It's hard to live in a house with people in such a vulnerable situation and not have at least a few lasting friendships, and there's some that I hope I never see again. So there's that too," she says.

While waiting for Season 3 of "For the Love of DILFs" to begin filming, Daniels is keeping busy as an entertainer and as a businesswoman. Her Adam & Eve Original movie "Redemption" is up for several AVN awards, and she is also doing a new political/paranormal podcast called "Beyond the Norm with Stormy" on which her first guest was Kris Goldsmith, a real-life undercover MAGA cult and Neo Nazi hunter.

"It's a pretty diverse thing. It's all like, you know, porn, paranormal and the really scary stuff, which is politics. So it's pretty diverse. But please, please check that out because the more subscribers I have, the more successful it is and the more pissed off the haters get, and, you know, that's what we want."

"For the Love of DILFS" is streaming on OUTtv. Visit the OUTtv website for subscription information.