CHATSWORTH, Calif.—Kayden Kross—the visionary whose work has captivated the adult industry—is fueled each day by an insult that still stings more than a decade later.
Pain and anger resonate in Kross’ voice as she describes that moment on a lonely midwest highway back in 2009. A radio station had flown Kross to St. Louis to co-host one of its talk shows for an entire week. One of the adult industry’s elite performers at the time, Kross had been a popular call-in guest, and listeners were demanding more.
Sitting in the passenger seat of the producer’s car, Kross noticed a vehicle was following them as they left the airport. When the man told Kross it was his wife, she asked why everyone wasn’t riding together.
The producer dropped his head.
His wife, he said softly, “didn’t want to breathe the same air” as a porn star.
“If a person did that in 2021,” Kross says, “it would be all over social media. She’d be ridiculed for being such a fucking asshole. But back then, not only did she say it, she got away it.”
Kross pauses and takes a slow, calming breath. Deep down, the performer-turned-director realizes what happened that afternoon was actually a blessing. All these years later, it’s given Kross a drive, a purpose.
“It changed me,” she said.
Indirectly, it also changed porn.
Although there are still plenty of views that need to be re-shaped, the adult industry continues to reach new levels of respectability among the mainstream public. More and more, people are realizing low-budget films with shallow plots, elementary dialogue and seedy characters are no longer the norm, but an outlier. In their place are projects like the ones conceived by Kross: High-dollar, Netflix-caliber movies featuring elite acting and in-depth storylines that serve to enhance the sex scenes.
Kross’ latest production, Muse, won the inaugural Grand Reel honor—the top prize for an adult production—at Saturday’s AVN Awards. And Kross was named Director of the Year for the third straight time.
Just as the name of her production company suggests, Kross’ projects go “Deeper” than the common porn fan is accustomed. Slowly but surely, her work—and the work of those she’s influenced—is changing perceptions.
“I want performers to be able to walk around outside the industry and be proud of what they do,” Kross, 35, says. “I want them to show people that it’s not something you sweep under the rug and dismiss and feel sad about because it’s this bad, unspeakable thing.
“That’s not what’s going on here. Things are different now.”
And that’s partially because Kross, herself, is different, too. Or as one industry insider put it: “Kayden has a gift. She’s more than good. She’s special.”
Indications that Kross would flourish in a career involving writing and creativity can be traced back to her early childhood.
While her elementary school classmates kicked soccer balls or took turns on the swing set at recess, Kross always found an isolated spot on the playground to read books. In the seventh grade Kross missed multiple weeks of school because of a fierce bout with mononucleosis. When she finally returned, her teacher suggested she submit five short stories and poems to make up for all the work she’d missed. Kross immediately reached into her backpack pulled out exactly what had just been assigned. Turns out she’d been writing at home to pass the time during her illness. So impressed with Kross’ work was her teacher that she asked Kross, who was bashful, to read her stories to the entire class.
“I was mortified,” Kross says, “but at the same time it felt good. I was passionate about the craft of writing. I’d go home after school and tinker with sentences. My teacher spent the rest of the school year pushing me to continue to do more.”
Years later, one of Kross’ professors at Sacramento State did the same thing, recognizing Kross’ talent and encouraging her to transfer to UC-Davis to study under one of the school’s legendary writing professors. By that point, though, Kross had become a topless dancer and was “living the stripper life,” she said, and eventually transitioned into porn at age 21.
As much as she loved writing, Kross feared she’d never find a career that would pay her decent money for her craft.
“I just had this idea when I was young that you can’t get by on writing,” Kross says.
She held to that theory throughout her early years in porn—yet her passion for writing continued to intensify. Multiple times during the peak of her stardom, Kross made midweek trips from Los Angeles to New York City to attend writing workshops led by well-renowned scribe Gordon Lish. In her free time, she continued to read and write.
Kross’ voice radiates with energy and fervor when she discusses writing.
“For me, there’s a high in perfecting the sentence acoustically in a way that turns something inside out,” Kross says. “It could be that you’re dragging your sounds in a certain way, or the beat of the sentence is very hypnotic. Or it could be a flat-footed sentence that kind of knocks you sideways.
“There’s such a high in knowing that you hit it with your sentence. You tinker and tinker with your synonyms to find the word that has the sound that makes it go where it needs to go.”
After ascending to the top of the industry as a performer, Kross’ path took a dramatic turn in 2014, when she discovered a way to blend her passion with her career. Performer/producer Manuel Ferrara, Kross’ longtime partner, was working on a new movie but didn’t want to pen the script, so he asked Kross to do it.
Instead of scribbling throwaway lines typical in a porn film, Kross found herself engrossed with words and dialogue, just as she was for all those short stories she wrote in her free time. The movie, Misha Cross: Wide Open, earned Kross numerous trophies on the awards circuit and sprung what has become one of the most brilliant directing careers in adult entertainment history.
Kross says she almost feels silly that she didn’t recognize the opportunity earlier.
“It was literally sitting in front of me,” Kross says. “I’ve got all this knowledge of this industry, all this understanding of this industry, and all I want to do is write. The perfect solution was right there, but it never occurred to me. Not once.
“Obviously, there’s always been writing in adult. But no one ever considered it a craft. It was just treated as something you needed to have so you can get the sex in. But I think it’s something that contextually amplifies the sex in such a massive way that, if you do it right, it blows the effect out of the water.”
Kross’ career as a director has been on an uptick ever since. Initially she brought her creative ideas to life on TrenchcoatX, a premium adult video site she started with popular performer Stoya. Her work there caught the attention of Vixen Media Group, which signed her three years ago to run Deeper, which is now one of its most popular subsidiary sites.
These days one of the biggest resume-boosters in porn is to be asked to appear in a Deeper production, whether it’s via a featurette for the website or in a full-length movie. Emily Willis, Angela White, Abella Danger and Riley Reid have all shot multiple scenes for Kross, but the biggest star in recent years has been Maitland Ward, the former mainstream actress from Boy Meets World whose talents have allowed Kross to push her storylines to even greater depths.
Kayden Kross accepting the Grand Reel award for Muse at the 2021 AVN Awards, with cast members Scarlit Scandal, Maitland Ward and Gabbie Carter.
“With Maitland,” Kross says, “I know when I send her a six-page monologue—which is always what happens—I know that she will give it the justice it needs. It will not be silly. It’ll be fantastic. That’s what I appreciate so much about her.
“For her, on the flip side, she’s being given the monologues she’s always wanted. She’s being given the meaty stuff. She’s not just the cute girl doing funny lines like she was (in mainstream). She’s being given something with grit. We’ve got a really good symbiosis here.”
Ward said she couldn’t be more impressed with Kross, telling the Daily Beast that “one day there will an Oscar on her mantle standing proud in the sea of AVNs.”
“It’s amazing to see the way Kayden writes and perfects her films in just such a profound, professional way,” Ward tells AVN. “She always talks about writing being very poetic. It needs to have a certain cadence and a certain rhythm. It’s a very long process, because she puts so much thought and planning into each word.”
Ward’s first major project with Kross, the movie Drive, was named Best Drama at last year’s AVN Awards and also earned Kross a nod for directing. One year later, Muse captured seven trophies at the AVNs, including one Ward won for acting.
Kross says she was particularly proud of Muse because it was shot during the COVID era. She penned the script in four days, and the entire project was shot in 10 days.
In Muse, Ward plays a psychology professor who, on the eve of the pandemic, sends her class home with an assignment to “create something that would be considered pornographic in any medium that you choose—and then show in a fundamental way why pornography can or cannot be art.”
“At one point,” Kross said, “someone asked me, ‘Can’t you just go easy and pick things back up next year?’ I was like, ‘No, Maitland won’t let me.’ I promised her these projects that are worthy of her attention. I couldn’t let the (COVID) situation get in the way.
“I think it’s truly the best thing we could’ve (produced) under the conditions. We are all very proud of it.”
So proud, in fact, that Kross plans to turn Muse into a series in 2021. There are other projects in the works, too. Along with producing her own content, Kross is determined to help others. She’s taken aspiring directors, such as rising star Adria Rae, under her wing and mentored them as they shot scenes for Deeper. Kross also helped launch an Intimates series that allows quarantined stars to shoot premium content from home.
“This industry has so much room to expand,” Kross says. “We’re a tiny seed of what we could be. By creating this kind of content … I mean, you can’t tell me that when you see something like Muse, you’re going to say, ‘It’s just porn. You’re just some stupid whore who wanted money for being on camera.’ You cannot say that this product is a result of that mindset. You … cannot … say … that. Because it’s not.”
Ward said Kross is breaking down so many walls between mainstream and adult that, eventually, there won’t be any walls left.
Perhaps then, that woman back in St. Louis will realize she had it all backward. “Breathing the same air” of Kross isn’t a disgrace.
More than anything these days, it’s an honor.
Photos by Jeff Koga/@KogaFoto
