LOS ANGELES—Katrina Jade admits she used to feel pressure to show that she belonged in the same conversation with the top performers in adult entertainment.
“I feel like last year I had a lot to prove given the tattoos on my face,” Jade says. “Nobody gave me a real chance. They’d be like, ‘no, you need to wear pink. You need to do this…’ That’s how it goes with new girls, you have to prove yourself constantly.
“I think once I hit that year mark I started to just slowly be able to show up and be myself. Now they’re like, ‘yeah, do it. Do what you do.’ I can be myself now. I don’t have to pretend anymore.”
And as Jade unleashes her freewheeling, adventurous attitude in her growing body of work, the results have begun to speak for themselves.
Now two years, nine months and 170-plus scenes into her porn career, Jade has proven she can go toe-to-toe with the best in the business, receiving a load of 2017 AVN Award nominations to back it up.
The 25-year-old star is a finalist for AVN Female Performer of the Year in addition to being in the running for five different sex scene awards for the 34th annual ceremony on January 21 at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.
Not bad for the girl who says she’s her own worst critic.
“I would throw last year’s version of myself down a set of stairs,” Jade says. “I was really insecure and I didn’t know anything. So I feel like if I just had more confidence in myself I could’ve blossomed a lot faster.
“I feel like I learned a lot more about my sexuality now because a lot of the things that I thought about myself—‘I like this and I don’t like this’—I’m just totally not that person anymore.”
Jade received nominations for Best Boy/Girl Sex Scene with Prince Yahshua for Big Wet Interracial Tits (Elegant Angel); Best Boy/Boy/Girl Sex Scene with Tommy Pistol and Mr. Pete for Cum on My Tattoo 5 (Burning Angel/Exile); Best Boy/Girl/Girl Sex Scene with Aidra Fox and Bill Bailey for Aidra Fox Is Slutwoman (Elegant Angel); and two Best Group Sex Scene nods—for Orgy Masters 8 (Jules Jordan Video) and The Sins Life (Sins Life/Jules Jordan).
Those performances were part of her most active year so far—70-plus titles—as she made the rounds with several blue-chip studios, some of which—Wicked Pictures, New Sensations, Jules Jordan Video, BSkow and Brazzers—have invited her back several times.
That experience that comes from throwing down with the pros has sharpened her raw sexual talent.
“Because people in porn are more in tune with their bodies. They’re more self aware and they’re all about chemistry,” Jade reasons. “And [before porn] I didn’t really know much about anything. I just liked to have sex with people.
“But now it’s like when you have sex with people that are way more in tune with their body you’re able to be more in tune with yourself. Because nobody has sex all day long for a movie in real life.”
She adds, “In civilian life it’s so much harder to find people to have sex with. Even people that you want to have sex with and they’re down, they’re not like confident. Or they’re not open. So it’s not nearly as intense.
“When you’re having sex on a daily basis for hours and hours at a time every single day I feel like I just learned a lot faster.”
Notorious for her unpredictable, outrageously naughty posts on social media, Jade brought a fan following with her to porn thanks to her popularity on Tumblr.
She and her husband Nigel Dictator, a photographer and videographer, not only talked the talk they also walked the walk long before doing it on a professional level.
“We had a huge Tumblr following before she even shot her first porn because of our lifestyle,” Dictator tells AVN. “We were always into the ‘hot-wife’ lifestyle and all that stuff—creampies.”
“Basically everything we already post now,” Jade adds.
“We would post our adventures on Tumblr so we had like 30,000 Tumblr followers and it wasn’t like a job either,” Dictator explains. “We weren’t even keeping up on it. It was just like oh my god we’re getting followers and it was just pure entertainment on our end. It was fun to us to entertain other people.
“We were so open about our relationship to begin with. From Day 1 we were a team.”
Jade says she and Dictator found it rewarding to be able to help couples by sharing their exploits on Tumblr.
“On Tumblr you can submit a question, instead of commenting. So people would ask, ‘well how do I get my wife to do this or how do I get my husband to do this?’ And all kinds of things,” Jade recalls. “So a lot of people opened up more with their partner too just by following us. We got so much response.”
Their original Tumblr page got hacked and deleted, but fans can catch their hijinks now on Twitter @KJ_fetishmodel and @nigel_dictator.
“That’s where it all started,” Dictator says. “We still get comments today and emails, ‘hey what happened to your Tumblr?’”
“Everything that we say now is really what we did before but now we do it professionally. Nothing’s changed,” Jade says.
A native of Southern California who is represented by OC Modeling, Jade briefly made a living doing hair and nails before porn.
“So I got my license and I started doing hair and it turned out I don’t really like doing hair, I like doing nails. I started doing nails and then I was working at an office and then doing nails on the side and then I met [Nigel] a few months later [in 2013],” she says.
Dictator worked as a marijuana grower in Lake Tahoe when he met Jade and hit it off with her immediately. The timing couldn’t have been better to transition to adult as he was ready for a change after 10 years in the pot industry.
“We started all this shit together basically,” Dictator says. “I was taking pictures on my iPhone and people were like your photos are awesome.”
So he invested in professional camera equipment and taught himself how to edit photos—much of his work can be found on his Black-Candi Tumblr page. His proficiency behind a camera has led to opportunities in adult, such as directing his first scene—a threeway with Jade, Johnny Sins and Kissa Sins for SinsLife.com that Jade considers one of her finest performances.
“That was one of the best days of my life,” Jade says. “The [Sins Life] orgy was one of the best days, too.
“I’m in love with her. We always tell each other we’re married—we’re wives—and if [Nigel] and Johnny died we’d marry each other. Or if one of us divorces the other. It’s like a pact. We have a pact that if we break up with one the other one has to leave the other. I’m a totally gay lesbian for her. And we are also like really intense as humans as it is.”
Jade says her chemistry with Kissa and Johnny is special.
“Johnny’s like ‘I’m happy to be here,’ and you can just like ignore him and he doesn’t care,” Jade explains. “So you don’t have to tend to him the whole time. And then me and her are just slapping each other and choking each other and screaming and then laughing. And then moaning and then laughing and crying all at the same time.”
Speaking of electric pairings, Jade notes that some of her best work comes when she squares off with Prince Yahshua.
“Everything with Prince is amazing,” she says.
Looking ahead, Jade says there is anal sex in her future and that “I feel like it’s my time. I have to do things now.”
“I want to start doing anal but a lot of companies still won’t shoot me and they’re slowly letting me in,” she continues. “Like Girlsway shot me—it took me the longest time to get in there. So they made me a villain—that’s just my persona. That’s why we put ‘KJ Villains’ on everything because I’m always like the villain in any role. I always come in and ruin the marriage or something because I’m like ‘the badass.’ I come in and destroy things at some point.”
Porn’s favorite badass is soon getting her own showcase movie thanks to being crowned the winner of the second annual Adult Empire “Empire Girl” contest, emerging from a formidable field of finalists in August.
Jade received $6,000 and a four-scene showcase contract with AE Films for winning the fan-driven competition that generated more than 49,000 votes. The movie is tentatively scheduled to go into production in December.
Jade says Adult Empire would like to see her online persona come through in the feature, which will include some of her signature antics such as public nudity.
“They want ‘us,’ which is exciting,” she says. “So I get a showcase finally and but then I can be myself. I’m not getting a showcase and it’s whatever they decide for the scenes. I feel like I’m a kid in a candy store.”
In a recent video Dictator shot of Jade during a trip to New York City, she can be seen pumping gas in lingerie, teasing in a wet t-shirt by the Brooklyn Bridge, flashing in restaurants and misbehaving in the back of a taxi.
“That’s another reason she got really popular is we were doing all the public nudity stuff and shooting all the stuff in grocery stores and shit like that,” Nigel reasons. “So they want to incorporate that into her feature.”
In other words they’ll be keeping things real for the loyal KJ Villains.
“A lot of people think—especially in our first year—they thought because of the way we look we’d be like hardcore druggies or partying crazy people and a lot of girls thought, oh she’s dirty look at all the creampies she’s posting,” says Jade, who doesn’t smoke or drink. “This is our life. We did this before. We do it now for money. Some people are really surprised that we genuinely are really into the business.
“They think, oh I’m just fucking around because I talk a lot of shit on Twitter. But it’s really our passion.”
And they’d like turn their passion for naughtiness into a lifestyle website in the future.
“I think of a lot of dirty, raunchy things that look crazy but [Nigel] comes up with ideas I never would’ve thought of,” Jade says. “So both of us combined we’re just monsters, it’s terrible.
“I want to stay in porn as long as I can whether it’s as a performer or a director at some point. Because this is what we did before. We were just whores and now we’re whores professionally. And if we left we would still be whores anyway with all this knowledge and nothing to do with it.”
Photo by Jeff Koga
