'Boy Meets World' 's Maitland Ward Talks Embracing 'More Scandalous Side' with Adult Film Career in New Memoir

Maitland Ward is sharing her experience breaking into the adult film industry after her time on Boy Meets World.

The actress, 45, played Rachel McGuire on the last two seasons of the ABC sitcom from 1998 to 2000, but she later found a career that she is exploring in her upcoming memoir Rated X: How Porn Liberated Me from Hollywood.

Ward started making adult films after she married husband Terry Baxter in 2006. He was "super supportive," she told Yahoo Life, adding, "Our sex life is way better now."

"I mean, it was always good and, and intimate and you know, like a marriage should be," she explained. "But I think now that I'm really open with myself and I can try new things and I'm not holding back or anything — I think that's really sexy."

Ward began her acting career on The Bold and the Beautiful in the mid-'90s and told Yahoo Life she felt like she "was always looked at ... as the more provocative one" on set. "People were fascinated by my long legs, and that I'm so tall and I have fiery red hair, and it was like it almost made that okay."

She noted, referencing one of her character's storylines on BMW: "If I was on a show, like Boy Meets World, I could be sexy. I could wear a sheet with little feathers on it in nude pictures that I had for my boyfriend — that's fine."

But according to the star, "If I ever wore anything like that, or did anything suggestive like that in real life, Disney and producers and Hollywood would've come down on me. Especially the producer, Michael Jacobs — he was very adamant about me being chaste and the good girl."

An attorney for Jacobs did not immediately respond to PEOPLE's request for comment.

Ward told the outlet that she realizes "It's scary to forge your own path, but it's the only way that you're going to be happy."

"It doesn't have to be porn. That's my more scandalous side," she said. "I didn't just switch overnight. It's about making conscious efforts and decisions over time to get to a place that you want to be, embracing your truth. I want people to embrace their truth and just live how they want to live and be who they want to be. People are attracted to that."

She also said she "feels less of that stigma" in regards to aging when it comes to adult-film audiences, as opposed to the general aging-related pressures of Hollywood.

"I had more fans coming along as I've been older and been sexual ... I was told nobody would come along and now I've had major success with it," Ward said. I think it's just all part of this Hollywood machine — they want to keep you in a certain place at a certain time."

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Rated X: How Porn Liberated Me from Hollywood is out Sept. 6.