Chloe Cherry thinks she wouldn’t have gotten into porn or acting if her dad hadn’t passed away
As the world gets to know more about Euphoria's breakout star Chloe Cherry, the young actor is opening up about how she's overcome some of life's biggest challenges.
The 24-year-old porn star-turned-Hollywood actress recently gave an interview for the podcast Going Mental with Eileen Kelly, during which she spoke about losing her father to cancer when she was 8 years old.
“When I was 7, my dad was diagnosed with cancer, and then a year later he died,” she said. “A whole year of watching somebody fight cancer when you’re that young, and it being your father ... it was a really weird thing to not only get used to the idea of somebody being sick, but that it can be your parent, and that they’re going to not only not survive but they were just gonna be gone. It was all really, really, really heavy at the time.”
“I feel like a lot of people who lose a parent around that age, around 10 or so, before you’re an adult at all, it’s really an interesting experience,” she added. “It’s crazy how that really just messes with your world.”
Growing up in Lancaster, Penn., a largely conservative town, Cherry remembers being bullied by "awful" kids at school because she didn't go to church. That treatment made the grieving process even harder, she says.
"Kids would freak out at you, like, 'Oh, God doesn’t like this,'" she said. "The weird s*** that I experienced with other kids yelling at me about God and Jesus growing up was hell. It was so awful."
She added, "Luckily my mom had a lot of close friends that were very close to us. What helped me get through [the grieving process] was knowing that … we were gonna have support."
Cherry, who admitted to being a "terrible" student in high school, also recognized that poor grades may have been a consequence of not grieving her father’s death properly — something she's learned to forgive herself for.
“Sometimes I’ll try to be nice to myself, like, you know, ‘Your dad died. Some people when their parents die they’ll do so much worse than just doing badly in school. They actually hurt people, they actually do bad things, so you can’t really blame yourself that that happened and that it led you to just not being able to do well in school,’” she shared.
Cherry, who has starred in more than 200 adult films and has over 125 million views on PornHub, also thinks about what her life may have looked like had her father not died.
“I always thought that if my dad lived that I would have just been normal,” she said. “I would have just gone to college like a normal f****** person and done just some random stupid job and have been some stupid normal person. Like, I wouldn’t be doing all this if my dad was still around. I wouldn’t be Chloe Cherry if my dad was still around.
"Part of becoming Chloe Cherry and wanting to become this completely other thing was part of wanting to escape my life, I think, and things, I guess," she continued. "Feeling like I wanted more from the world and also feeling this feeling of, like, there’s no time to waste because you never know what’s gonna happen.
“I constantly think, gosh, I would be so normal if my dad never died,” she added. “I would just be an average person — but I don't know if I would want to be that.”
Despite where she's come from, though, one thing is for sure: Cherry lives her life with no regrets.
The star has opened up in the past about her years working as an adult film star and overcoming a serious eating disorder.
In a March interview for the podcast Call Her Daddy, the star confirmed she was “done” with the porn industry and has no regrets being part of it — except, maybe, for the way her friends viewed her afterward.
“The only thing that sucks about working in porn is the way that people will treat you outside of the industry,” she said at the time. “Just the way that, suddenly, my friends that I was friends with in high school didn’t want to be friends anymore because they thought I was going to f*** their boyfriend. It’s like, I don’t want anything to do with your boyfriend.
“These weird ideas that people get about you I think that’s the only bad thing about it,” she added of doing porn. “I lost a lot of female friends because they thought I couldn’t be around them. Or their boyfriend would say 'no, you can’t hang out with her,' and they actually would listen to them, which I thought was the craziest part.”
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