There are actually a number of TV faces who have hopped from the small screen to platforms like OnlyFans. Former Boy Meets World star Maitland Ward is among the most well-known, but Wizards of Waverly Place star Dan Benson is another. Recently, the former Disney Channel star opened up about how he “accidentally” fell into the platform, which is known for its NSFW content.
Benson, who is mostly known for playing Zeke Beakerman in the Disney Channel original series, recently spoke out about his work on OnlyFans, discussing how he sort of fell into it after chatting with another person he thought he had known well for a year.
It just became such a long-term thing that I felt like I knew them and then ended up sending nude photos to them. And it was months and months later that I kind of found out that those nude photos had been leaked online and that there’s now websites that are selling those pictures and videos.
Plenty of stars have spoken out before about their nudes getting leaked online. Jennifer Lawrence called her nude photo leak “unbelievably violating.” Marvel star Chris Evans called his own nude leak “embarrassing.” Yet, for the Wizards actor, learning that he could take lemons and make lemonade out of the situation seemed to be the correct path. In a longer interview, he told Page Six:
I had grown into understanding it and being comfortable with my own sexuality, and the thought of doing it publicly, it just didn’t scare me at all.
Though he didn’t join the platform for “at least a year or more” after the incident, he eventually took the plunge. Now, he says a huge swathe of fans who had grown up on Wizards of Waverly Place have reached out to share their stories with him.
And I get messages all the time from people that say, ‘Hey, you were actually my gay awakening.' And first of all, that’s super flattering for me. That’s incredibly endearing and awesome. And [it] is funny to me because Zeke was, like, the dorky, goofy character on Wizards of Waverly Place. So I’m like, it’s shocking to me, but I think that’s cool.
These days, the OF star says he’s making decisions for himself that he feels he can live with. Sure, the platform is making him a pretty penny for nudes and more – though he declined to clarify how much – but he says his main goal is to not take money for something that makes him “uncomfortable.”
I don’t want to look back in 10 years and go, ‘OK, I made all this money, I got all this fame because of this, but goddamn it, I was doing all these things that made me feel uncomfortable just for that.
Previously, the aforementioned Maitland Ward admitted she makes at least six figures from OnlyFans, and that’s per month not per year. Bella Thorne’s stint on the platform netted her a million bucks on the first day, but the average person on OnlyFans doesn’t do nearly as well. Luckily for Dan Benson, it seems like there are a lot of Wizards of Waverly Place fans out there.
