WOODLAND HILLS, Calif. — “Nervous” isn’t the right word.
“Maybe more like ‘starstruck,’” giggles Kenzie Anne, twirling a strawberry Blow Pop over her tongue as she lounges near the pool at Motley Manor, the gated, 4,500-square-foot mansion of her agent, Dave Rock.
The adult industry’s newest “it girl,” Kenzie is attempting to describe the emotion that engulfed her prior to her debut scene back in March, when she swiveled in her makeup chair and saw Emily Willis, the reigning AVN Female Performer of the Year, standing before her. Across the room, changing into lingerie, was Alina Lopez, a box-cover staple who is hailed as one of the most beautiful women in all of porn. For the past few years, Willis and Lopez had been two of Kenzie’s idols.
Now they were her co-stars in her first-ever studio shoot, an all-girl tango for Vixen, one of the most prestigious companies in the business. More than two months later the scenario remains surreal to the hazel-eyed newcomer.
“They threw me in with the tigers,” Kenzie says. “I bow down to those girls. I’m their biggest fan. I told them, ‘Thank you so much for doing this shoot with me. I’m ecstatic to even be in your presence.’”
It won’t be long before Kenzie is viewed in the same manner. Heck, some would say she already is.
Despite having only six scenes to her credit, Kenzie’s career is taking off like the Millennium Falcon, propelling her toward the top of the industry at warp speed. Instead of casting couch videos and POVs with faceless talent, Kenzie has been ushered in by icons such as Willis, Lopez, Angela White, Manuel Ferrara and Jax Slayher. Already under contract with Vixen, she’s the first-round draft pick who skipped the minor leagues and became an all-star as a rookie.
Fueled by aggressive marketing campaigns, Kenzie’s content generated buzz weeks before its release. Each time, the hype was proven justified, with Kenzie’s performances not only meeting expectations, but surpassing them.
Motley Models agent Ryan Kona, who works directly with Kenzie, says the former cosmetologist has the tools to become a “world-renowned, international superstar.”
“She’s a step ahead of a lot of girls who have been working a long time,” Kona says. “That’s no disrespect to anyone, because everyone learns and grows at a different pace. But Kenzie is already there.
“There’s no one else like her. She’s a supernova who is going to explode and take over the industry.”
One thing working in Kenzie’s favor is her experience. Along with being an influencer on Instagram, she’s spent the past decade glamming it up for Penthouse, Playboy and Maxim and has done numerous shoots for fashion brands such as Wet Seal, Free People and Carbon 38, among others.
Instead of a bashful nubile in her late teens or early 20s, studios who book Kenzie are getting a seasoned, 28-year-old supermodel who’s poised in front of a camera and thrives as the center of attention.
That’s certainly evident during the media event at Rock’s palace. Despite being a newcomer who’s meeting many of her Motley roster mates for the first time, Kenzie weaves throughout the property with the swagger of an industry veteran.
With her cascading, all-natural blonde hair in pigtails, Kenzie—who stands 5-foot-7—shoots Instagram reels on the tennis court before relocating to the driveway, where she poses seductively in front of a 2021 orange Lamborghini. Moving inside to the billiards room, she does a shoot in lavender lingerie and then models bikinis on the patio.
Finally with time to unwind, Kenzie plops onto a sofa near the pool and opens a bottle of water. For the next half-hour, in her most extensive interview to date, she’ll talk passionately with AVN about her vision for her future. She’ll reflect on her past, and perhaps most interestingly, Kenzie Anne—the next big thing in porn—will reveal how she ended up here in the first place.
Kenzie scoots to the edge of her seat, rests her forearms on her thighs and leans forward.
“You know,” she says with a sly smile, “it all really started with a slice of watermelon.”
***
Bikinis and blouses; leggings and lingerie; makeup, mini-skirts—even six-figure sports cars.
Kenzie Anne modeled just about everything imaginable during her first eight years in front of the camera. But in 2019, shortly after she turned 26, a photographer friend named Halston suggested a new prop.
Food.
Halston—who had worked with mainstream Hollywood talent for more than a decade—had been hired by Playboy Mexico to launch the Eats Channel, a new venture featuring short snippets of scantily-clad supermodels snacking in a sensual manner. Halston immediately thought of Kenzie, whom he knew from previous fashion shoots.
Cherries, lollipops and ice cream cones made for some steamy reels, but it was a poolside video that aroused viewers the most. As she took bites from a watermelon slice, Kenzie allowed the red juice to trickle from her chin, down her neck and onto her oiled-up, naked body.
“At that point,” Halston said, “something clicked. You know how some girls have ‘resting bitch face?’ She has ‘resting bedroom eyes, lips and voice face.’ It’s the whole combination.
“I just thought, ‘This girl is a Ferrari. Maybe we can push things a little bit further.’ I’d never thought about shooting porn before, and I’m not sure if she had, either. But that day was what sparked everything.”
Indeed, after only a few discussions, Kenzie and Halston decided to pursue a career in the adult industry—but with one caveat. Instead of cliche, run-of-the-mill content, they would shoot only “glam porn” on elaborate sets with fancy lighting and camerawork, and storylines featuring Kenzie alongside the industry’s elite performers.
“It’s the only style that would fit her,” Halston said. “She oozes high-end.”
Kenzie smiled when asked to describe the plan hatched by she and Halston.
“It looks like supermodels fucking,” Kenzie said. “It’s like candy. You want to taste it. It doesn’t look dirty, like it would on some nasty couch. It looks … beautiful.”
Even before her career began, it was always assumed Kenzie’s good looks would eventually catapult her into the spotlight. One could even say she was predestined for it, as her mother was a runway and pageant model before embarking on a successful career as a cosmetologist. “I’ve always been influenced by her in terms of beauty and makeup and hair,” Kenzie says.
Raised in Newbury Park, Calif., Kenzie wasn’t allowed to begin modeling until she turned 18, but that didn’t prevent her from creating a buzz with her good looks. Throughout high school and into her early 20s. Kenzie dropped jaws with even the most simplistic of actions.
“I had boyfriends tell me that even the way I eat is sexual,” Kenzie says. “Without even trying, I naturally commanded attention. When I was growing up I didn’t know how to feel about it. I’d have normal conversations with men and they’d think I was being sexual with them, that I was leading them on. It put me in a danger zone.
“It made me feel uncomfortable.”
The self-consciousness would hover for years. But at age 25, Kenzie Anne came to a realization. And then she made a change. Her natural, sexual vibes, she vowed, would no longer evoke feelings of guilt or shame.
They would give her power.
And rescue her from the darkest period of her life.
***
The sofa was gone.
Her ex-boyfriend took the chairs, tables and bed frame, too. Suddenly—after a six-year relationship—Kenzie Anne found herself alone in a rental home without furniture, save for a mattress strewn across the living room floor. Each night, as she lay wrapped in a coverless duvet, Kenzie had the same recurring thought.
What am I going to do?
A licensed cosmetologist since she was 19, Kenzie had spent the previous six years doing hair and makeup at her family’s salon. But that was no longer her passion. She quit and enrolled in nursing school, occasionally earning money on the side doing fashion shoots. But the sporadic income hardly put a dent in Kenzie’s mounting tuition fees, car payments, delinquent credit card bills and her $3,000-per-month rent. Being newly-single only made things worse.
Nearly $100,000 in debt, Kenzie’s situation became so dire that, when she opened her pantry, she saw two things.
“Top Ramen and Progresso soup,” she said. “It’s all I could afford. Being in debt like that … it feels like you’re in shackles. You’re totally caged in. I was craving freedom, and that’s not freedom.”
Deflating as her predicament was, Kenzie found a solution.
She’d dabbled in camming before, but shaming by her boyfriend always kept her from pursuing it full time. But now there was nothing to hold Kenzie back, so she converted her living room into a studio and put a stripper pole in her kitchen. Each day after nursing school, Kenzie would come home and cam, sometimes deep into the night.
The first month she made enough to pay her rent on time. A few weeks later she was able to purchase a pink bed frame. The craziest part, Kenzie said, is that only a handful of people knew about her “side job.” During her first two years of camming, Kenzie shot all of her videos from the mouth down, so no one could see her face.
“It was this big secret I had that no one really knew about,” Kenzie said. “I was in nursing school and I still wasn’t sure where my life was headed. There was a lot of shame around the concept of sex work, and I wasn’t totally confident in it yet.”
Eventually, though, it was impossible for people not to notice that Kenzie’s lifestyle had changed. Her once-barren apartment was now filled with expensive furniture. She purchased a Mercedes and ordered more freely at restaurants. No longer was she stressed about bills, as camming had enabled her to pay off every last cent of the debt she’d feared would haunt her until her 30s.
“Every single month,” she said, “I was doubling my income.”
After hundreds of hours in front of the camera, Kenzie had the freedom she’d craved. Not just financially, but mentally. One morning Kenzie summoned her mother to a coffee shop and informed her she was dropping out of nursing school to pursue adult work full time.
“I felt like a new person,” she said. “I felt so empowered. I was running my own show, my own business. Society tells us not to be sexual in public, so I’d been avoiding being who I really was. But with camming, I could be myself. And once I learned how to make money off of it, I felt power.”
With her confidence higher than ever, Kenzie began seeking new opportunities as a model. She continued the vanilla fashion shoots—“my side hustle,” she laughs—but now she mixed in erotic photos for magazines such as Maxim.
Kenzie took things a step further when she spent an afternoon in the desert posing for pictures to submit to Playboy. Kenzie funded the entire shoot, paying the rate for the photographer and his crew while also picking up food and travel costs. About a week later, though, the photographer had a change of heart and refused to send Kenzie the images.
“He totally dropped it,” she said. “He was like, ‘I don’t want my work related to your name at all. I’m trying to work with Guess and all of these big brands, and no one is going to want someone who has worked with a person like you.”
Looking back, Kenzie is actually thankful for that experience. Being shamed—once again—for sex work helped shape the mentality that fuels her today.
“It was a pivotal moment for me,” Kenzie said. “It sent me over the edge. I was like, ‘Fuck this. Fuck everyone judging us. I want to completely rep this career now. If people are going to have problems with it, I’d rather find out who they are now so I can just write them off. If you have a problem with it, we’re not going to work together, so we can just quit wasting each other’s time.’”
Kenzie pauses and smiles.
“Once I made that decision,” she said, “it was the happiest moment—a huge sense of relief. I’d put myself out there, and now I didn’t need to hide behind anything anymore. I’ve been moving forward ever since.”
At a rapid pace, too.
Kenzie appeared on Playboy Plus in 2020 before joining forces with Halston on the network’s Eats Channel. She was chosen as Penthouse Pet of the Month in November—just before the launch of her self-funded website, Kenzieland, where she produced her first pornographic content. Her girl/girl scenes with performers such as Kendra Sunderland caught the attention of Vixen, which offered her a contract.
Following her debut scene with Willis and Lopez, Kenzie shot her first boy/girl scene with Slayher.
“Lots of times, new girls are nervous or maybe a little intimidated,” Slayher told AVN. “But Kenzie was different. Performing with her was like working with an elite, top-tier veteran. She was relaxed and confident. She went in and killed it.”
Indeed, even though she flourished as a fashion model, Kenzie is more in her element as a porn star, when her clothes are completely off. Being naked, she said, brings her comfort and allows her to operate with a greater sense of self-assuredness.
“Sometimes you’re shooting in certain outfits,” she said, “and things pinch you or don’t look right. People never say anything about the fabric. Instead they’re like, ‘It doesn’t fit you.’ It gave me body dysmorphia. I started feeling more comfortable when I was walking around naked inside my house.”
Kenzie calls it “air bathing.”
“I feel my sexiest when I’m naked,” she told Penthouse last fall. “Fashion always feels like I have someone else’s body or expression on. Whoever designed the clothing wants you to feel a certain way when you have it on. I can appreciate the art in it.
“But it’s not my art.”
***
Each morning—and then multiple times throughout the day—Kenzie Anne scrolls through the hundreds of DMs that flood her accounts on Instagram and Twitter. Lately, many of them read exactly the same.
“Everyone,” she said, “asks when my next scene is coming out, or who I’m shooting with. People want answers. They’re craving more and more and more.”
"Everyone who gave this girl a huge endorsement was 100 percent right,” her agent Kona said. “There are lots of models that come into this industry that look great, but they’re not the best in front of the camera. Being pretty isn’t always everything. The performance has to be there, too.
“There’s an ‘it’ factor you need to be a superstar in this industry, and Kenzie has it.”
Halston agrees. He said he and Kenzie’s goal was “to do something huge, right from the start.”
Kenzie certainly accomplished that in her debut effort with Willis and Lopez. Entitled “Breaking Through,” the scene opens with Lopez and Willis scrolling through Kenzie’s Instagram feed. Lopez tells Willis that Kenzie “dropped out of nursing school, became a fashion model, dabbled in cam stuff, and now she’s interested in porn. She was looking for advice so she hit up Vixen, and now here we are.”
Moments later, Kenzie makes her grand arrival. Wearing a see-through gown lined with sequins, she steps off the elevator at a high-rise office building, walks into a lounge area and finds a half-naked Willis in a chair.
Naked under a charcoal mink coat, with a pearl necklace splayed over her torso, Willis says: “You have the looks, I’ll give you that. But porn is more than just looks. Do you have what it takes?”
Kenzie gazes at Willis’ body and smiles.
“Why do you think I’m here?” she says, and then the fun begins.
Willis—who captured a ceremony-high nine trophies at the AVN Awards in January—said there are plenty of reasons to believe that Kenzie has a bright future in the adult industry.
"She was very cool to work with,” Willis told AVN. “She was very professional and nice to everybody. I always appreciate working with performers who are a pleasure to be around on set. She’s got a good attitude and she’s very hot. And she seems to really want to do porn.”
Slayher expressed similar feelings after he and Kenzie went one-on-one in “This Is Not a Drill” for Blacked. In the scene, Kenzie pulls in Slayher’s driveway in a red Lamborghini wearing nothing more than nail polish and lipstick. “When you have a dick appointment with Jax,” she says in the scene, “you’d better keep your entire day open, because these appointments usually run long.”
“It was like a two-headed snake,” Slayher said. “The chemistry and energy were there from both of us. Anyone who watches it will see two people who genuinely love to fuck each other.”
Kenzie said it was an honor to shoot with Slayher, adding that she told him before that scene that she’d been masturbating to him for years.
“I like that he goes all in,” Kenzie said. “It doesn’t feel like he’s acting. It feels natural. He’s so aware of the camera, so he’s going to make sure that me, as a woman, is displayed perfectly. It’s like dancing. It’s the one time I think it’s really important for the man to take the lead to get to those points.”
Impressive as she’s been on studio sets, Kenzie is also winning over fans on Instagram, where she updates her story multiple times per day. Porn stars and supermodels who post videos frequently are walking a slippery slope, as they often alienate fans by acting snobby, entitled, aloof or pretentious.
Kenzie, however, has mastered the Instagram game simply by being herself. Sure, there are plenty of sexy, pouty-lipped modeling posts featuring slinky swimwear with bougie backdrops and accessories. But the things that stick with you the most—the things that make Kenzie so likable—are her interactions with her Siberian husky, Lola, who howls with passion each time she suggests going on a walk. Or the time she asked viewers whether her leopard-print bikini top was suitable restaurant attire. Of course it was. Or the time she busted into silly poses on random street corners in New York.
Kenzie’s most endearing quality, as she’s revealed on Instagram, is her ability to embrace her imperfections, whether it involves a stubborn pimple or her forehead, a tear in her skirt or a bloated tummy after she and a friend ordered $104 worth of ice cream on Door Dash. Most recently, Kenzie struggled to pull a pair of shorts over her rear, likely because she’d gained a pound or two during the pandemic.
“That’s COVID’s fault—but hey, it’s a good thing,” Kenzie said, and then she broke into her trademark, high-pitched giggle that usually morphs into a full-on cackle. It’s an “every-day girl” vibe that’s extremely rare for a supermodel.
“Once you get to know her,” Kona said, “she’s impossible not to like.”
Still, make no mistake. Kenzie definitely has a diva side—or as she says, “a princess side.” One of her most enjoyable activities is pampering herself.
“If I can relax with a face-mask or go tanning or read a book or even just put my feet up … just being able to do nothing and beautify is so important to me. It’s very cleansing.”
As striking as she is physically, Halston said it’s a different trait that gives Kenzie so much staying power in porn.
“Kenzie,” he said, “is at her best when she opens her mouth and talks. She’s incredibly bright, incredibly smart. She has a very strong vision for who she is and where she wants to go.”
That was evident when she launched Kenzieland, the elaborate website featuring solo masturbation scenes along with hookups between Kenzie and established talent such as Sunderland, Ashley Lane and promising new starlet Charly Summer.
Her drive is obvious during the shoots she’s helped conceive for Vixen, and it’s even more apparent when she talks about her goals for the future.
“I can picture this big, beautiful cocktail party,” she says, “where people and celebrities are gathered, and there’s a wall where Kenzieland is playing in the background—almost like a museum for my porn channel. It’s my favorite project. It’s my baby. I want it displayed everywhere.”
A lofty target, to be sure. But ambition is what launched Kenzie this far in the first place.
“You’re either a winner or a loser,” she said, “and it feels way better to win. The last two years of my life I’ve been pedal to the metal, and I fucking love it. It’s been so satisfying to keep going and going and going. I’m always one step ahead. I’m going to consistently evolve and move forward.
“I have big dreams and goals and I’m not going to stop until I reach them. And once I do, I’ll come up with new ones.”
Kenzie knows detractors and haters will surface along the way. It’s a catty industry, and already there are rumblings of jealousy surrounding the considerable push Kenzie has received so early in her career. Some may say she was anointed too quickly, without paying her dues.
When asked about the issue, Kenzie shrugs. In some ways she understands. She’s been that jealous girl before, too. But in this case she said it’s important to remember that she’s been modeling for 10 years. Kenzie has felt the pressure of being at the bottom, endured the pain of broken promises and been insulted with indecent proposals. She still managed to persevere and surge forward.
“It’s the same stuff people go through in porn,” Kenzie says.
She smiles gently.
“I’ve finally reached the point where I don’t have imposter syndrome anymore,” Kenzie says. “I’m proud of the work I’ve done to get here, and I feel very deserving of the place that I’m at. I’m happier than I’ve ever been—and this is just the beginning.
“Things are only going to get better from here.”
Photography by KogaFoto
