Fresh Faces: Athena Fleurs

This feature appears in the September issue of AVN magazine. Click here for the digital edition. LOS ANGELES—Athena Fleurs once decorated 90 cakes a day during her stint as a cake decorator. “I had to be there at 3 a.m. because the place opens at 5,” she says of the Safeway grocery store where she worked in the bakery. “I had to complete 30 cakes by 5 a.m. “I had lot of caffeine and a lot of nicotine at that point in my life.” She added the final touches to dozens of birthday cakes and a fair amount of divorce cakes, too, writing “Congratulations!” several times a day with icing.But Fleurs grew to dislike the job and went back to exotic dancing. “It was stupid,” she says with a laugh. “I was just there during Covid. It was also hard. It was so much work and I got paid so much less than I was used to.” Now Fleurs is one of the rising stars at Motley Models, which recognized her potential and signed her earlier this year. Since then the dreamy blonde performer says everything has gotten sweeter. “Athena has been such a great talent since coming on board,” Motley owner Dave Rock tells AVN. “She has an amazing work ethic, super professional demeanor and a mainstream modeling quality that the studios are really eating up. “We anticipate her to be a major force in the biz for a long time and we are honored to represent her.” Fleurs, who at press time was planning to move from Sacramento to the Orange County area of Southern California, tells AVN she has done about 55 scenes since her debut last September. Some of her credits include multiple scenes for Vixen Media Group, Evil Angel, Hustler, Team Skeet, Nubiles and Spankmonster. She points to her encounter with Oliver Flynn for Hard X as her favorite so far. “I liked working with a female director,” she says, referring to the veteran shot-caller Mason. “I had never worked with a female director before that so that was just different to me." She also enjoyed mixing it up with the seasoned deal-closer Flynn. “I knew who he was but I had never shot with him before,” Athena says. “He’s cool. He makes everyone feel very comfortable on set.” The 22-year-old native of Monterey, Calif., most recently danced at Gold Club Centerfolds in Sacramento. She’s been a dancer off and on for more than four years at clubs in northern California. “I have done it since I was 17,” she says. “I don’t know if I like it or it’s just all I know." Athena started dancing in the Bay Area—where a fellow dancer later referred her to her first porn agent. Also known as Athena at the club, she worked at Vanity in San Francisco and then at the Spearmint Rhino in San Jose. “The lady at Spearmint Rhino who owns it told me not to get into the porn industry because she didn’t want me leaving, so I almost didn’t because of her,” Athena says. “... She thought I could make more money dancing.” But Fleurs, who admits she’s an “impulsive” Aries, went for it anyway. She would drive to LA every just about other week to shoot before deciding to move to OC, which is located about 40 miles south of LA. “I like having that separation so I don’t overwork myself,” she says. When she’s not working, she likes to play her acoustic guitar and cook. Athena, whose dad also plays guitar, enjoys playing country music on her Luna. "Whenever I’m home and I don’t have fake nails on, I play," she says. Meanwhile, Fleurs can make almost anything from scratch—she’s especially good at cooking pasta. Athena spent a semester in Italy during high school and learned how to cook. Fleurs tells AVN she can even make mayonnaise from scratch. Even though she's making a name for herself in adult, she hasn’t forgotten her rural small-town roots. “When I go back I’m always around animals,” Athena says. “I grew up with a horse and my grandpa was a rodeo clown. We’d go to stampedes, like mini rodeos.” She continues, “My dad is into classic cars. He’s a pinstriper.” Athena says she chose to keep her dancer name for her adult stage name because she wanted something that begins with A; and Fleurs is the French word for flowers. “Every year I make a goal board,” Athena explains. “So on my front door I have a board of everything I want to accomplish by the end of the year and I’ve already accomplished everything on it this year. “So I’m very grateful I could do everything before the year ends. Next year I don’t know what my goals are but I think I want to focus more on growing my social media and my OnlyFans.” She also wants to meet more people in the industry. “I want to try harder to make real friendships because I’ve never been able to before,” she says. “I want to be in the industry for a long period of time, I don’t want to do too much too quick.” Photography by Jim Mullin