Fresh Faces: Alina Ali

A version of this feature appears in the February issue of AVN magazine. Click here for the digital edition. LOS ANGELES—Even though she strongly identifies as an introvert (or, at best, an ambivert), Alina Ali has always been comfortable both in her skin and also showing it. “I’d be riding on the Mardi Gras float and these women would be flashing their titties at us,” Alina Ali remembers from her wild Louisiana youth. “I was fascinated by Jessica Rabbit as a kid, and I thought: ‘I want titties myself.’ And then I got them. And now I flash them.” Ali, born on the bayou, recalls the first time she saw a Playboy. “It was when one of the boys who also rode on the Mardi Gras float came back to the treehouse where we were all playing (it was a post-Mardi Gras crawfish boil) and said, ‘I found something in the bathroom. I saw a magazine with naked ladies in it!’ I said, ‘I want to see a magazine with naked ladies in it!’ “I went to the bathroom secretly and looked. It was so cool.” Later, when searching for the character Bella from the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game, Ali stumbled on Belladonna videos (Parental Lock wasn’t on, apparently), and she thought, “This is what I want to do." “Even being shy, I’d be the person at YMCA camp making up plays and directing people,” Ali says, echoing something very similar to what Belladonna told this writer once—that the shyness falls away when she’s in control. One description of introverts and extroverts is that both can go to a party and have a great time, but the extrovert gains energy from the party whereas the introvert spends it, and needs to recharge. “Porn is a perfect job for me,” she says, “because every job I had before, where I was a server or a waitress, I’d show up late. I’d do a good job, but I’d be late. I feel way more free in this environment, and I can be a team player and really feel like we’re working together on a movie, and then I recharge.” The permissive culture of New Orleans is special to Ali, who never had any hangups about sex (“I mean, on the Mardi Gras float, there’d be girls flexing their tits at my grandpa, and in Louisiana you can drink as long as you’re with your parents and they give you permission”) but who also admits to feeling guarded, which makes her scenes especially fun to watch. She comes off as cool, reserved, slow to warm up (she calls herself “semi-friendly” in her Twitter profile). But once she gets going… “I was a lot more outgoing when I danced,” she says, breaking down a difference between introverts and extroverts. “You’d think that doing porn scenes would be easier for an introvert than dancing, where you have to be ‘on’ for a bunch of strangers, but it didn’t work that way for me. When I’d be dancing, I could be on for everybody in the room, knowing that they were probably from somewhere else and I’d never see them again. So it would be fine for an hour or two. In a porn scene, you really develop a relationship with the people on set, so for an introvert that’s more pressure.” Ali, who is booking through East Coast Talent, credits porn with jumpstarting her independence. She came to California in November, 2019 to shoot her first video. “Not only was it my first time in Hollywood,” she says, “it was my first time on an airplane. Before this, I was really co-dependent, but at the same time it was really fucking dope to be scared shitless. And it’s strange, because right before I got on the plane I saw a sign that said, ‘If it makes you scared, then you have to do it.’ I’m so happy that I did. “Because now, I’d say that I’m half a homebody and half a crazy person. The ambivert stuff is real! I’m very protective of my energy, so if at first I have that cold stone bitch face and it seems like I hate everyone, you just have to talk to me and then you’ll know different." Ali likes the fact that her first experience with pornography—as opposed to Mardi Gras flashing—was in an old-timey paper magazine. And her look is a throwback to those 70s/80s centerfolds, too, as well as some of the starlets of the Porno Chic era. She seems especially groovy when she gets all French Quarter and calls us “Babe.” “I’ve always been very self-aware,” she says, “although I’ve made mistakes and have been through some fucked-up things in my life. But in learning to set boundaries—which is something I didn’t always do—I also have a lot more fun. In porn I had my first threesome and gave my first rimjob but, oh babe, even though I did just about everything else before (in her private life), it doesn’t mean I was having the same type of fun.” ' Photography by @adamparkerart