Page 79 - AVN Feb 2022

“I write to the actress rather than trying to conform the actress to something that
she isn’t.”
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.
“And then one day, Manuel comes home,” Kross explains, 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.’”
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