LOS ANGELES—Director and AVN Male Performer of the Year Seth Gamble teases fans with the release today of the trailer for his next big Wicked Pictures project, the crime saga Reckless.
Produced by four-time AVN Director of the Year Axel Braun, who also shared camera duties with Billy Visual and Sammy Slater, Reckless is an eight-scene epic also starring Gamble (in his first lead in a project he wrote and directed) as Silas Knight, a racing enthusiast and tech genius enmeshed in a web of greed and betrayal after designing a chip that radically improves car performance. From his true love Harlow Knight (2019 AVN Best New Starlet Ivy Wolfe) and ex-partner/rival Brooke Michaels (2022 AVN Best Leading Actress Kenna James) to corrupt detective Matteo Bennett (AVN Hall of Famer Lexington Steele) and an appearance from the psychotic Dr. Joseph Curwen (last seen in Gamble’s Deranged and once again embodied by Tommy Pistol), everyone wants what he has.
“Filmmaking is like painting,” Gamble said. “Every stroke or every color impacts another and you just build on that canvas and you get new ideas right up to the last stroke. I’m trying to use the camera to get into people’s heads. I use camera techniques a lot to articulate character. That is what art is about. Art is about reproducing and recreating what you feel. My background as an actor involves the same choices, whether it’s choosing roles or writing scripts.”
He continued, “I directed Tommy Pistol in Deranged, but believe it or not, we’ve never acted together before in a serious feature where we shared the screen. So, it was incumbent on me to make it finally happen. If you look at my body of work, there’s always a dark side to my characters, they’ve always got a subtext.
“Deranged, Privilege and Reckless intersect as one 24-episode series. Reckless looks at the lives of the characters portrayed by Mick Blue, Tommy and others prior to the events of Deranged,” Gamble revealed. “We’ve seen this approach in parodies, but I’m not sure it has been done with an original IP before. My characters are complex and that comes from my scripts and my research and reverse-engineering what I find in the real world. Because the real world has always been far more exciting and funnier and more dangerous to me than anything somebody could conjure up sitting in front of a computer. The real world is where I go to educate myself. I go and touch the real world and touch real people. That’s the way into my movies.”
Filling out the cast of Reckless are top-draw talent including Kenzie Anne, Ryan Reid, August Skye, Nicole Doshi, Nathan Bronson, David Lee and more.
“This ensemble is truly a bucket-list lineup of wonderful performers,” Gamble hailed. “I think the guiding principle for me in casting is that I want to seize the moment and work with the people I see as the best possible fit for their characters. Because the true excitement comes from the performers—that gives you the real drama—and whatever I can do with the camera, that’s icing on the cake.”
This principle led Gamble to tap Braun himself for a major non-sex role as Italian mob boss Dino Moretti. First introduced in Privilege, Moretti is a major player in the shadowy machinations Silas must face.
“I’ve often done small cameos in my movies just for giggles,” said Braun, whose latest award-winning Wicked parody SpideyPool XXX starring Gamble as Deadpool is up for more accolades at the XRCO Awards next week, ”but this was different. Seth constructed an intricate plot stretching across a cinematic universe, and wrote some very intense dialogue, and as much as I tried to convince him otherwise, he was adamant that I had to be the one playing this role. I’m not an actor and had plenty on my plate as a producer … I would have turned down anybody else, but I just couldn’t say no to him.
“I guess while Seth was learning the ins and outs of directing on my sets for the past fifteen years, I picked up a thing or two about acting from him,” Braun laughed. “All jokes aside, I had a ball playing Dino, and absolutely loved being directed by Seth. It was an important moment for both of us, it felt like a passing of the torch and I’m very happy that we had it. It’s a fact that his exponential growth as a director in a really short time has impressed everybody, but while Reckless is in itself a monumental achievement, I promise you it’s only the beginning of what Seth will go on to accomplish. I’m endlessly proud of his dedication to excellence and very much looking forward to seeing him reach the pinnacle of the adult industry.”
Gamble was similarly fixated on one person for his female lead. “Sometimes, you seek people from real life who’ve lived the lives of the characters, and you talk it through together to reach an understanding, but Ivy Wolfe had such a presence, and we had so much chemistry together, that putting anyone else in her role was unthinkable. She’s won Best Actress from AVN in the past and this is her next classic performance. Our relationship in the movie is palpable. My character is someone who loves to test the dark side, and she responded to the adrenaline junkie side of the character, as well as the introspective side.
“I want to thank the many people who worked tirelessly to make Reckless what it is,” Gamble concluded. “I truly cannot sing the praises of this cast and crew enough. Just know that from the bottom of my heart, I appreciate every single person that has worked on creating this boundary-pushing series. And thank you, Axel, for always having my back. You are truly an inspiration.”
The first scene of Reckless will debut May 26 exclusively on Wicked.com, to be followed by seven additional episodes.