A Field Guide To Winter Ave Zoli

Winter Ave Zoli: you love her on "Sons of Anarchy," you lust after her in "Cat Run 2," and you've looked at her Playboy spread more times than you can count. But how much do you really know about her? Well, whatever the answer, it's time to learn a whole bunch more.

Winter was born March 30. 1980, in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where she spent her earliest years. At the age of 11, her family relocated across the Atlantic to Prague, where Zoli was able to connect with her father's Slovakian relatives. Enrolled in the International School of Prague, she began to study ballet, but found that her love of acting and stagecraft drew her to musical theater.

By the tender age of 13, Zoli was already working professionally as an actress, building out her resume with roles in American and European theater productions that made their way through Prague. Her professional stage experience intensified her love of the craft, and at 19 she moved to New York to enroll in the prestigious Atlantic Theater Company acting schools (founded by David Mamet and William H. Macy, two guys you maybe have heard of). 

Though Zoli's love of acting was born on the stage, after graduation she made the choice to pursue a career on screen. She was able to find success pretty early on, earning roles in films like "Hellboy" and "Tristan + Isolde" and TV productions like the "Revelations" mini-series. By 2009, things had really started gearing up, and Winter found herself taking on two of her most exciting roles.

The first of those roles? Libuse in "The Pagan Queen," an indie film that caused a massive scandal in the Czech Republic (even as it garnered little notice anywhere else). Though the movie wasn't a major hit, it was a lead role in a fascinating indie film about the dying days of Europe's pagan culture, with Zoli playing a legendary Slavic queen of Bohemia. It was also, we should note, Zoli's first nude role (brief as that onscreen nudity may have been).

Not surprisingly, Zoli's second most exciting role is also her most notable one, that of porn star Lyla on FX's "Sons of Anarchy." Though she went into her audition assuming she'd be on for just an episode or two (and knowing very little about the show to boot), Zoli quickly fell in love with the whole experience – and was thrilled to see that two episode arc extend into a multi-season role (as were her many, many fans).

Wondering how she got ready to portray a porn performer on film? Turns out the process involved a whole bunch of research: "When I first started with the role of Lyla, I read books about the porn industry, and watched some biographies of porn actresses.  Now, I sometimes use my acting coach to help me figure certain scenes out, and for emotional scenes I have to draw on real life issues to help me get there."

After all that research into the skin industry, it seems only natural that a girl like Zoli would find herself fantasizing about what it might be like to really make a living being naked. And in 2011, she got a chance to find out. After years of playing sex workers on screen, Zoli made her debut as a nude model in a March 2011 Playboy spread, which she saw as an extension of her sexy, scantily clad endeavors on "Sons of Anarchy," and, at the end of the day, not that big a deal. (As she told Fox News in an exclusive interview, she'd discovered that nudity is "not a problem" for her, an attitude we wish more of her colleagues shared.)

Given the number of times that Zoli has played sex workers on screen, you'd be forgiven for picturing her as a wild, crazy party girl, but off camera, she's actually very, very different. Unlike Lyla Winston, Winter Ave Zoli is actually a rather quiet, timid girl – albeit a quiet, timid girl who's actually quite good at Muay Thai. She's also a major Shakespeare fan ("The way he wrote always struck a chord within me."), and wishes she'd gotten a chance to share the screen with film legend James Dean (though no word on how she'd feel about sharing the screen with porn legend James Deen).

And now that her role on "Sons of Anarchy" is over and done, where will her career take her? Well, if her latest role is any indication, we'll be seeing a whole lot more of Zoli... or at least her boobs, anyway. Sure, we know that Zoli the actress has more to offer than just onscreen nudity, but if she ends up getting typecast as hot sex workers who show their stuff on film, we're certainly not going to complain. Hey, when you've got a talent for a role, you keep at it, right?