Former Biohazard frontman Evan Seinfeld on his porn career and new adult app

“Are you Scottish?” enquires former Biohazard frontman Evan Seinfeld of my accent, before noting: “Biohazard’s tour manager was Scottish. Working with us was so stressful, because we would have fist-fights backstage, that he had two heart attacks.”

As leader of the Brooklyn metal/rap hybrid group, Evan toured with the likes of Slayer and Guns N’Roses and predated the ascent of nu-metal. He then went on to star in HBO’s critically-lauded cult prison series Oz, but his later work might cause a few heart palpitations in itself: he pivoted to becoming a porn star, and built an empire in the adult industry. Now, he’s launched a platform called IsMyGirl where models and porn stars can produce and sell their own content.

With people’s lockdown-thirst hitting Tier 4, it’s experienced an upsurge in popularity. NME caught up with him to to talk metal’s backlash to his new career, kicking it with David Bowie and why Obama would be the ultimate CamBoy.

Hello Evan! How’s tricks?

“If you’d asked me what would everyone do in a global pandemic, my first answer wouldn’t have been, ‘The advent of homemade adult content shared by influencers to their fans becoming the biggest business in the world’. But it seems like that’s it is. In America, 70 million people lost their jobs. If you’re over 18 with a smartphone, you can join our platform or our competitors’ like OnlyFans. It’s a movement.”

So how did you go from playing in Biohazard to building a porn empire?

“Biohazard sold five million records in the ‘90s and played with everybody from Metallica and David Bowie to Red Hot Chili Peppers and Wu-Tang Clan. I had a prolific music career and wasn’t looking for anything else. But I was a big fan of the HBO prison series Oz, and it turned out a lot of actors from it were fans of Biohazard, who turned up to see us play. I was introduced to its creator Tom Fontana, who wanted to put me on the show. I’d never acted before, so it was trial by fire. Plus, in Oz, they’d kill maybe four people per episode – we used to semi-joke that how they decide who dies on the show is by who’s the worst actor. But that showed me I was able to do different things.”

Like most actors on Oz, you did naked scenes. But how did you make the leap into starring in actual porn films?

“One day, I’m contacted by people at the Playboy network – it was my ex-wife, Tera Patrick, who wanted to meet me. She was a porn star, I fell in love, and applied what I knew from branding and connecting with your fans from the music industry to her career. And I fell in love with the business. I knew the future lay in connecting with your fans directly and companies like mine and OnlyFans have created a paradigm shift of who’s in control of the business and who makes the lion’s share of money. People imagine the adult business to be exploitative but it’s shifted to where the talent is in complete control.”

Cardi B is on OnlyFans. Will you be recruiting any pop or metal big-names for your platform?

“We’re talking to a bunch of pop stars of our own but I’m not naming names until the deals are done. Although they’re not doing porn, having Cardi B on these platforms sends a message that it’s a cool thing to do and there’s no shame involved.”

When you first started in appearing in porn, what was the reaction like from your musical peers?

“Mixed. Some said: ‘Dude, are you on drugs? You’re throwing away your acting career.’ But I made more money in a month in the adult business than I did touring tirelessly in Biohazard. I stayed in Biohazard for 10 more years out of my love for the music and the other guys because I knew if I stopped, they wouldn’t make a living. Some Biohazard fans were confused, saying: ‘Man, I don’t want to see your dick! I just want to hear you sing’. But I needed to do this for myself. They don’t have to look at it – it’s not like someone’s holding your eyes open like in Clockwork Orange.”

Were metal artists accepting?

“There were a lot of heavy metal and rap artists I knew who were so put off by this, they didn’t want to hang out or would act oddly around me. I’m like: ‘Really? You guys are in a huge band that sings about Satan and the Holocaust and the fact I’m fucking on camera upsets you?!”

Will there ever be a Biohazard reunion?

“I don’t think I’d ever do a reunion. I’m a creator. Right now, I’m building a platform using livestream technology for people to smoke weed together, and I’m planning on launching my own cannabis brand in 2021.

“I don’t go to reunions of bands because I always feel like it’s sad. One guy’s dead, everybody else is old and fat. The Rolling Stones are in my top three artists of all time, but I wouldn’t go and see them now because they’re my dad’s age and I don’t like the way they play now. I love Biohazard; it’s just my natural flow went on to something else because I wanted to write a different style of music – and I never wanted to disrespect Biohazard in a way that wasn’t true to its roots. The beauty of Biohazard is it was 100 per cent authentic. It was purely from the bowels of Brooklyn. We started a genre and put the hip-hop in metal. We put the peanut butter in the chocolate.”

So what was it like when you saw nu-metal popularise that combination?

“I liked that Linkin Park took what they heard from Biohazard and made it bigger and better, and made hits. I became friends with those guys – and RIP Chester [Bennington]. I love evolution in music. In fact, Liam [Howlett] said the turning point for The Prodigy was when he saw Biohazard play live, and that’s when it all clicked and realised that’s what we needed to do with his band, But now I feel with my social media business, I’m better serving the world by helping connect people than playing a bunch of songs I’ve played a lot of times already.”

So that chapter’s closed, then? 

“Well, I’m thinking of writing an autobiography because I’ve loved so many lives. But because I suffer from severe ADHD, unmedicated, I’m either going to get a co-author or call the book 50 Unbelievable Stories That Are All True In No Particular Order (Laughs).”

Give us a flavour of your unbelievable stories…

“Us inviting the crowd at Donington [Download] onstage with us and the security pulling the power on us and a riot breaking out. Getting arrested in Brazil. The second time I performed in Donington with Kiss – who were from my home in Brooklyn and my favourite band when I was aged 11. To become friends with them and jam Kiss songs in front of 20,000 people with [Kiss guitarist] Ace Frehley… I’ve lived out so many childhood dreams.”

Never mind the foreplay, what was it like touring with David Bowie?

“I hung out with him when we did a bunch of gigs in Europe. In 2006, I did a VH1 reality show called Supergroup with Ted Nugent, Sebastian Bach and Jason Bonham – that debacle! But the upshot is, I became close with Jason and we’re like kindred brothers, and would stand and play Led Zeppelin songs all day. He phoned me straight away when he got the Led Zeppelin gig and invited me to the O2 gig where I was actually his mother’s chaperone. Backstage, it was a who’s-who and David Bowie comes right over to me and went: ‘Remember those shows we did in Germany?’ This is making me unexpectedly emotional. Being around Bowie, there was nobody with that energy who left an impression that all people are not the same. That we all have some untapped thing and if we can harness it, we can all be like him. He was a genius.”

Anybody in the music world with the makings of a good porn star? 

“It would be Offset or Justin Bieber – people want to see something they think is secret or a scandal. Everybody saw the Tommy Lee sex tape. I’m friends with Tommy and it was the greatest money-making stunt ever pulled. If you ask me what would sell more than anything, it would be a sex tape with Barack Obama and Melania Trump.”