Kayden Kross: Sitting Pretty

This is the February 2022 cover story of AVN magazine. Click here for the digital edition. LOS ANGELES—Looking out over the majestically idyllic hilltop ranch she purchased just a few months ago, Kayden Kross seems almost existentially at peace. “This is what I was trying to do the whole fucking time,” she muses matter-of-factly. “This is what I was hoping for from the beginning. This has really been the sort of goal in sight at each step through my whole career.” And what a spectacular career it’s been: Vivid, Adam & Eve and Digital Playground contract star. AVN Awards Show host. Trenchcoatx co-founder. Vixen Media Group directrix extraordinaire. Three-time AVN Director of the Year. And Hall of Famer. From the start of it all, Kross has put forth an image of herself as what might be termed the “brainy beauty” type—the thinking man’s porn star, if you will. When she signed with Vivid in 2006, she was attending Sacramento State College as a psych major and described herself as a “bookworm” who was “finding it harder and harder to see how my studies could work into a career that would get me motivated.” Whether or not her studies had anything to do with it, there’s no question that her penchant for the written word would ultimately—and maybe a tad ironically, looking back at that fresh-off-the-bus quote—serve as the foundation of what her career would eventually become. For the greater part of her now 36 years, Kross says, she has been “obsessed with writing. That’s like the thing that I love.” At one point, during an unofficial break from the industry following her directorial debut—the 2013 all-girl Digital Playground feature Girl Squared (which she now says she doesn’t really consider her first directing effort “mostly because I didn’t actually direct it ... I wrote it, and I was really proud of the writing, and then, like, everyone else directed it”)—she even set out to change careers entirely to full-time scribe. “I decided that I wanted to write for a living, and that was going to be what I was going to pursue,” she recalls. “I was writing freelance for things like the IB Times, I had a column for Nylon. I was writing. “I would spend more time trying to get paid the pitiful amount that they paid me than I would spend doing the writing,” she scoffs. “It was such a pain in the ass to track down the actual payment well after they’d publish the shit. I was like, ‘OK, well I can get hired, but I can’t get paid. And at this rate, it’s a second job just keeping up on that.” Regardless, she says, “Every day I’m waking up, I’m like, ‘All I want to do is write for a living.’ And I write a book ... throw it away. It’s terrible, I decide. Write another one, throw it away. I mean, we’re talking a hundred thousand words apiece. Trash. “And then one day, Manuel comes home,” Kross continues, referring of course to her significant other and fellow AVN Hall of Famer Manuel Ferrara, “and he says, ‘I don’t want to do my project for Evil Angel this month.’” That project was the 2014 star showcase Misha Cross Wide Open. (It was in 2017 that Ferrara switched teams for his directorial work from Evil to Jules Jordan Video.) “And he says, ‘Do you want to do it?’ And I said, ‘You know what? Yeah.” So she wrote a script (“I was pulling from Little Birds by Anaïs Nin”) and this time when shooting got underway, “I didn’t feel lost,” she submits. “For one, I didn’t have people telling me how things had to be, but also, just time had passed, I had learned more, I had a better understanding of how to achieve what I had in mind, things like that. “And I just kind of got bit by the bug.” The Permaculture Way A fascination Kayden Kross has taken up in recent years—which wholly informs her approach to cultivating and fostering the sprawling assortment of produce-bearing plants and small menagerie of animals populating her newly acquired three acres—is the principle of permaculture.  “It’s about how you design systems to work intelligently ... the mantra is ‘put things where they go,’” she explains. “So for example, I put my citrus up where it gets lots of sun and drains really well, I put my stone fruits down by the creek where they get lots of chill hours, and they can handle more water than the citrus can and would like a little more dappled sunlight than the citrus. You know ... put things where they would naturally want to be if they were growing in the wild. “Permaculture is just basically saying all right, this is what nature does in the real world,” she goes on, “let’s mimic what nature does because obviously it’s more perfect than we are. We are not God.” Asked how much she feels the tenets of permaculture carry over to her directing methods, she replies without hesitation: “Completely.” In conceiving a project, Kross expounds, “I write to the actress rather than trying to conform the actress to something that she isn’t. I try to put people with people who share chemistry. I try to put looks and feels and vibes or whatever you want to call it with people who naturally give that off. I stalk them online and look at their social media and get a sense of who they are, and I build to them. I don’t hammer them into something else that doesn’t make sense.” A shining example of this process in action is her now AVN Award-anointed Emily Willis star showcase Influence Emily Willis (just crowned Best Star Showcase at the 2022 AVNs), which marked a decided departure for Kross as her very first bona fide comedy. “I sat down with Emily, and I didn’t expect this because Influence 1 with Elsa [Jean] was nothing like this, but I sat down with Emily, and I came out and I’m like, ‘I’m feeling this light-heartedness that’s really fun, that I really want to see more of,” Kross reflects. “So I took it to this, like, Wes Anderson space, but still incorporating everything she told me.” With both Influence and the Gianna Dior vehicle Psychosexual (which earned her this year’s AVN trophy for Best Directing – Narrative Production), Kross divulges that she conducted the same intensive personality probe of her respective stars: “I said, ‘If you were a weather, what weather would you be? If you were a color, what color would you be? If you were a car, what car would you be? If you were an animal, what animal would you be?’ I asked them open-ended questions about their childhood. I made them both bring me their favorite book, and I read the book. I asked them about their favorite movie and I watched the movie. I asked them their favorite stars and I modeled them after the stars. “Emily Willis said Audrey Hepburn.” The process, needless to say, tends to bear glorious results. “The number of times a girl has been like, ‘Oh my God, this is so me’ ... it’s more times than not,” she proudly asserts. “It’s really cool. And every time I hear that, it’s my favorite thing to hear. Like knowing that I hit the nail on the head ... I love it. I love it so much. And it’s happened so many times. And girls are always like, ‘How did you know?’ and it’s funny because it’s not that I knew, it’s just that from what I knew, this made sense, and then it turned out to be true. I like that. That’s one of the most enjoyable parts for me.” With such a remarkable tally of illustrious accomplishments under her belt at such a relatively young age, one has to wonder what Kayden Kross could hope to achieve next.  “I want my career to keep heading in a direction where I get to not leave my property,” she half-jokes. “I have my horses outside and my dry creek and my stone fruit orchard and my citrus orchard and chickens ... that’s ultimate success for me.”    Photos courtesy of Vixen Media Group