Francesca Le and Mark Wood: A Porn Love Story
Twenty-three years later, Mark Wood and Francesca Le are still having fun. They’re having fun on camera, as viewers see on a regular basis, and they’re having fun as a married couple living the American dream. Theirs is a story of love conquering all in a business that sometimes allows carnal pleasure to overshadow sweet, simple romance.
When I interviewed them in 2022, they sat side by side, in the kind of easy, relaxed posture of a couple that knows one another through and through. Wood held one of their pet dogs on his lap, an endearing sign that, despite their porn stardom, this pair navigates ho-hum domestic routines just like anyone else.
At times during our webcam interview, the computer’s facial recognition software malfunctioned, blurring Wood’s face as it would a wayward portrait in the background. Perhaps it’s appropriate in the sense that some find it hard to imagine a pornstar duo functioning as smoothly as these two always seem to. Porn’s history is filled with porn couples whose offscreen relationship was reduced to shambles by onscreen woes.
Not so for Le and Wood. They are as gloriously conjoined as the portmanteau that forms the name of their signature studio, LeWood. Admittedly, there may be times you need to squint through their bickering, which one of their trademarks.
Most couples bicker over topics like money management, in-laws, and vacation plans. For Le and Wood, though, the arguments almost always come back to one thing: filmmaking details in their porn shoots. “Usually it’s something technical like the angle she’s shooting something, or light, or the still she took,” Wood told me in 2022.
“One time I was shooting AJ Applegate by myself without Mark. He was working on something else, and AJ said, ‘You know, I like it when you and Mark are working together and bickering. It’s so much more fun when I can listen to you arguing than when you’re here by yourself,” Le said in a 2018 interview with Adult Empire sibling brand HotMovies.
Like many couples, Le and Wood first met at work. But when porn is your vocation, “meeting at work” is a little different.
They started in porn at opposite ends of the 1990s: Mark in 1998 and Francesca in 1990. Le notched plenty of memorable work over the course of the decade, including an AVN-winning turn in New Wave Hookers 3. By 2001, she had moved away from performing. “In front of the camera, I had been retired for quite some time. But I was working, producing, and directing and also ran sales for an adult company.”
Wood, meanwhile, was finding his onscreen groove for companies like Devil’s Film, Heatwave, and Extreme Associates, where Le worked in a sales role. They crossed paths there and struck up a few conversations, but Le was initially reluctant to explore anything more. “I didn’t want to be dating the talent, or other directors or workers, their employees.” When they eventually yielded to their chemistry and began dating, Le tried to shield the info from her co-workers. “I was the only girl in the office and I didn’t want everyone to think I was easy,” she joked in a 2004 interview with Rog Reviews.
They revealed their relationship with a shocking flair worthy of one of their later movies. “She had come [to see] my band playing on the Sunset Strip here at the Whisky. It’s a nightclub and I had a lot of people from her office come,” Wood told me. “And she came in and after we performed I got off stage and then I just went up and kissed her. And everybody was like, ‘Oh my god, what’s happening?’ We just threw it on them then that we’re dating.”
Their decision to marry was no less impulsive, the couple later recalled. They went to Vegas, found a chapel with an “Elvis-looking dude,” and exchanged vows. “It was lust and a lot of booze!” Le joked to HotMovies.
The next year, they founded LeWood, a porn label that continues to be an industry byword for the efficient, professional, fun brand of porn its creators have always represented. It’s shown a particular skill for spotlighting new and upcoming talent, something that stems from their cohesion as collaborators as well as life partners. Jamie Kelly told us that Le was incredibly patient with her during her shoot, a trait that has undoubtedly grown from her accrued experiences on and off the set.
Jealousy isn’t a problem for them, either. “A lot of times in the business, especially with some of the newer couples and if they work together, there is some jealousy issues or weird love-triangle type vibe, because maybe they make the talent feel uncomfortable. There’s this edge that’s there. We don’t have that. That’s not the issue. It’s never a jealousy thing,” Wood said.
LeWood collaborator Brittany Andrews confirmed this in a 2022 interview. “Sometimes I work with [Francesca] and her husband and they are hilarious. She often runs the camera, right, so I’m fucking her husband, which, you know, in most cases would be awkward, like ‘Hey, girlfriend known you for 25 years, just here to come to fuck your husband.’ But you know, known him forever. This is what they do,” she recounted. Le and Wood are far too committed to creating a fun, relaxed porn experience — for audiences and co-stars alike — to allow petty emotions to get in the way.
According to Andrews, Le even wears a toolbelt on set, filled with items she might need to make the shoot run smoothly. “She keeps handkerchiefs, right? So that if you have any drippies, she just comes in while she’s shooting camera, cleans the little drippy off your ass and then puts it back in her construction belts,” Andrews noted in her typically droll manner.
As LeWood, the brand and the marriage, nears its quarter century mark, Francesca and Mark take it day by day. They even introduced a new brand, Smut Factor, in 2022, to expand their porn repertoire. “We’re just in the moment and we make a good team. We just balance each other,” Wood said.
In porn as in life, finding the right balance goes a long way.
