No wonder it’s the happiest place on earth.
Maitland Ward, once a young actress on “Boy Meets World” and now a porn star, says her funniest fan encounters happen with Disneyland dads.
They “are there with their families,” she said. “It’s not always, ‘Hey, can I have your autograph?’ It’s just like a look … like ‘Oh yeah, I know you from somewhere,’” she told The Post.
More than two decades after her first TV role as a 16-year-old, Ward signed on her first adult feature film “Drive” in 2019 at the age of 42. Her father learned of her new career in The Post.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God,’ ” she recalled.
“It beat Bernie Sanders’ heart attack the day it came out on the Google searches,” she added. “It was number one like all day.”
She said her parents were “incredibly supportive” and her husband, real estate agent Terry Baxter — whom she met on the set of the soap “The Bold and the Beautiful,” where she got her start as a teenager — “was along [for] the whole ride with that.”
Ward has been in a total of 25 adult films to date, with titles like “Cosplay Queen” and “Poolside Affairs.”
She shot 10 — including “Poetics for Tramps” and “Mistress Maitland” — for the website Deeper.com, where she tends to play the role of a mistress.
“I play this very mistress-y character a lot of times where I’m very intense and maybe smoking a cigarette,” she explained during a Zoom interview at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas.
In September, the sultry star released her memoir, “Rated X: How Porn Liberated Me from Hollywood.”
One story that did not make the book happened two weeks prior to the pandemic — when she went out on Hollywood Boulevard with fellow porn star Riley Reid in lingerie, asking men to show pictures of their nether regions. The video of the memorable event was posted on YouTube and now has over 2 million views.
Some said they didn’t have any, which the pair didn’t buy. “We were like, ‘We don’t believe you, Ward, 45, said. Others presented photos that looked too good to be true.
Ward was always told that no one would ever look at her in a sexual way.
“Producers, Disney, publicists, managers, whoever it was, were always like, ‘No, you can’t be sexy,’” she said. “They thought the only trajectory for me would be to be a soccer mom or to be in Hallmark movies.”
The California native started posting photos on social media in cosplay, bikinis, and body paint — and when she created her own content on the membership platform Patreon at the beginning of 2018, was surprised at how quickly she gained subscribers.
“By the end of the week. I was like the number one adult creator for Patreon,” she explained.
That year, she experienced her first impromptu sex scene while celebrating a belated Kiss on Ginger Day, which falls on Jan. 12.
Since no Hollywood actresses would kiss her, she partnered up with porn star and fellow redhead Elle Alexandra, who predicted Ward’s next career move.
“By the end, it got really hot and heavy … we went places we didn’t think we would go,” she said. “And at the end of it, she was like, ‘You’re gonna do something in the adult industry one day … you’re too comfortable doing this in front of the camera.’”
Now, from her OnlyFans page alone, she makes six figures a month and said her most interesting requests aren’t sexual.
“I would have people ask to just pretend they’re on a date with me like they’re meeting me at a bar,” she said.
Others request that she act as her “Boy Meets World” character, Rachel, whom she played from 1998 until the sitcom ended in 2000.
“I had a couple of people tell me, ‘You’ve made my fantasies come true because I never thought I’d actually see you have sex.”