Andrew Bonomolo says he relocated back to North Carolina after landing a role in Cape Fear Regional Theatre’s production of “Bright Star.” He was let go the day before rehearsals started, in a meeting held just minutes before his first scheduled call time. And according to Bonomolo, the theater never gave him an official reason. He says he was told informally that it was because they’d discovered his history as an adult film performer and OnlyFans creator.
Bonomolo, who trained in musical theater before moving to New York to pursue performance work, built a substantial following (over 660,000 on X) under the stage name Troye Jacobs, where he posted explicit content and starred in adult films. That chapter of his career ended more than a year before this incident. He’d stopped posting adult content and shifted his focus fully back to theater acting, but according to his account, it wasn’t enough to stop the theater from firing him once they found out.
The irony wasn’t lost on Bonomolo, and he said as much directly. “Bright Star” tells a story centered on someone shunned and punished for being sexually active and making their own choices, with a villain who shames that person specifically because he’s afraid someone else’s honesty might expose his own reputation. “And here I am, let go from that very production because of my own past,” Bonomolo said in a statement to Out. “I’m not trying to place blame, but you can’t help but notice the show they’re producing is telling the exact story that just happened to me.”
Rather than stay quiet, Bonomolo went public with two Instagram videos, framing his situation as a test of whether the theater community’s stated values actually hold up under pressure. “It is my firm belief that sex work is work and there should be no world in which that allows jobs to terminate you based on their prejudice,” he said in the first video, posted August 18. His frustration wasn’t really about losing this specific role. It was about the fact that the firing happened at all, in 2026, in an industry that likes to think of itself as progressive. “I’m more disappointed that it’s 2026 and we’re still firing people based on whether or not they’ve done porn,” he said, calling on the theater community to actually stand behind sex workers if its inclusivity claims mean anything.
His second video, posted August 22, made the hypocrisy argument more pointed and specific. Theater routinely celebrates and awards actors for portraying strippers, sex workers, and hypersexualized characters onstage, treating that work as brave and artistically serious. Bonomolo’s point is that the industry applauds the performance of sex work while punishing the people who’ve actually done it for a living. He drew a direct comparison to Broadway Bares, the annual burlesque fundraiser where hundreds of actors strip for charity and get celebrated as heroic for it. “So let me get this straight,” he said. “Turning your body into art for a fundraiser makes you a hero, but doing it to pay your rent and make a living makes you unemployable?” He didn’t soften the conclusion: anyone holding that double standard, in his view, “should be ashamed.”
Bonomolo also alleges the theater has tried to quiet him since the firing, a claim he’s explicitly rejecting by continuing to speak publicly. “I can tell you right now, that is not going to happen,” he said. “I will say it a million times, sex work is work.”