At first glance, Gianna Dior is effortlessly stylish, well-coiffed and every bit as elegantly high-end as her brand surname suggests. Yet beneath her undeniably alluring and charismatic exterior, she is an exquisitely engineered machine.
It may be tempting to paint a sports car analogy here, a Lamborghini or Maserati, but if anything, she is a fighter jet. After all, she was raised with the ironclad discipline and ambition-fueled work ethic of a family deeply steeped in the red-white-and-blue power of the superior-to-all-comers U.S. Air Force.
“My family is military — mom, dad and sister — from the Air Force and somehow we ended up in Andalusia, Alabama,” she told XBIZ. “I scored really high on my military test, even though I didn’t mean to, so they were pressuring me and pressuring me to join as well. They offered me really good benefits, and I would have been fully set up. But I said, ‘I don’t think I can do this. This is not my personality. This is not me.’”
For a time, she flitted from one dreamscape to the next, envisioning herself doing everything from cleaning teeth to pursuing justice.
“I never knew exactly what I wanted to do,” Dior remembered. “I was always bouncing around. At one point, I wanted to be a chef. Then, I wanted to be a dental hygienist. And I wanted to be a forensic psychologist. I was just bouncing all around. So right before porn, I was going to school for forensic psychology and working two jobs, including at a sushi restaurant.”
Interestingly enough, her fascination with the mind — and sex — would culminate in the ensuing years in a masterwork showcase helmed by multi-award-winning Vixen Media Group director Kayden Kross, titled “Psychosexual.”
The brand-crossover feature spans Vixen, Deeper, Tushy, Blacked and BlackedRaw, drawing together Dior’s personal passions and interests into the crescendo of a vibrant adult career that first began in 2018.
Now, as one of the most in-demand stars from the elite Spiegler Girls agency, Dior has begun unfurling her inner dynamism in a way that finally reveals her true complexity and warrior spirit with panache.
“I was always super interested in how the mind works,” she shared, laying the groundwork for how her academic studies would later influence her cinematic sexual escapades. “And I’ve always been in therapy, always going to psychologists all throughout my life. I was just very intrigued. I started seeing a psychologist when I was two or three, since my parents got divorced when I was a baby and they wanted to make sure I was good.”
In fact, one of her first memories was playing with little blocks in the psychologist’s office, and Dior is still intrigued by the insight a professional can glean from the simplicity of a toddler’s words and playful actions. Even before her college specialization in human psychology, she was taking extra classes on the topic in high school and reading about it like a fiend.
“I was always finding so many fucking books about psychology,” she explained. “And I’m very intuitive. It’s just so interesting to me trying to figure out what other people are thinking and getting a grasp on it. And you can hate on Sigmund Freud, saying, ‘Oh, he had all these misogynist ideas,’ but if you look at what his ideas stem from, what he actually believes, you can find unique ways to read people and enhance your intuition.”
She surmises that a person’s capacity for accurate intuition is a question of nature versus nurture, with some individuals hard-wired to pick up on vibes and physical cues, while others acquire such a skill due to how they were raised.
“Like, how you grew up, your environment and the way you figure things out is a huge thing,” she explained. “And I’ve always been very self-sufficient since I was little. I feel like that was a huge contributor to my intuition.”
Beyond her gut instincts and strong grasp on human behavior, Dior also developed resilience in mind and body due to the habits her military family instilled in her. At the age of five, she had to do ten pushups after waking up in the morning.
“And my parents would literally make me do a military bed, where you would bounce a penny off your bed to make sure it was up to par, haha,” she recalled, with no small degree of bemusement. “That’s literally how I grew up.”
This toughness has proven especially useful, Dior observed, in an oftentimes coddling cultural climate which — thanks to being plugged in 24/7 to social media — can leave younger generations overly reliant on seeking the approval of others, and with a propensity to immediately block, attack or withdraw from anyone who disagrees with them. She has both compassion for, and little sympathy for, folks who seem incapable of overcoming minor challenges or affronts to their person.
“Yeah, it’s painful when I see people my age now who cannot deal with real life,” she said. “I’m able to figure things out; if there’s a problem, I’ll figure it out.”
One of the things Dior figured out, with just two semesters left to finish her psychology degree, is that all those remaining math and science classes she had held off on taking were not worth the final leg in the journey.
“I was like, ‘I really don’t want to fucking do this.’ And it was perfect timing. It was like April or May of 2018 and that’s when I was on Tinder. Everyone thinks, ‘Oh, she was just looking for love on Tinder,’ but I was like, ‘No, I was looking for a dick.’”
She matched with an adult performer on Tinder, who asked her if she had ever considered getting into porn. One conversation led to another, and Dior found herself traveling to Miami to do her first-ever scene that spring.
“And it’s kind of weird how it all of a sudden happened,” she reflected. “I did one scene, and I was like, ‘This is fucking awesome. I’m getting paid for what I already love doing. I love being in front of the camera. I want people to watch me getting fucked.’”
She never went back home or back to college after that, even though she was already registered for classes; on her transcript, it just shows zeros for the last semesters. “I really fucked up my GPA,” she admitted. “But yeah, I just never fucking went back. At some point, I will continue and go back to school.”
Early on, when she was in the Reality Kings warehouse after doing a scene in Miami, adult superstar and Brazzers frontman Keiran Lee hit her up on Twitter, asking how he could go about booking her for a scene.
“And I was like, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have an agent right now. And I don’t live in Los Angeles; I’m in Miami.’ And he just sends me this number, where he’s like, ‘Call this number.’ I didn’t even know who Keiran Lee was at this time; I didn’t know who Mark Spiegler was, which is who he wanted me to call.”
This time, the nononsense, military-style discipline Dior encountered was that of Mark Spiegler, who brings it to bear on his roster, lending his agency a stellar reputation in the attendance department, as directors know they can rely on a Spiegler Girl to show up when she says she’s going to show up. Even if a star is in the middle of taking a shower, when Spiegler calls, they pick up the phone.
“He’s asking me all these questions during that first conversation,” she remembered. “He’s like, ‘OK, if you want to be represented by me, you have to move to Los Angeles.’ And I’m like, ‘OK, done. I’m already in this industry for real.’ So I had to drive from Miami to Los Angeles, because I had all my shit in my car. I literally packed up everything that I owned into my little Chevy Cruze, and I drove all the fucking way to Los Angeles. And I’ve been a Spiegler Girl ever since.”
After she first arrived, like several neophytes before her, Dior stayed in the extra bedroom Spiegler keeps for new talent when they’re transitioning to L.A. life and are still mid-move. Given her independent streak and need for space, she quickly got a hold of her own place and began going full-throttle at a breakneck pace.
“Spiegler had me booked every fucking day,” she said. “Usually, that type of shit would stress me out, but for this, I was actually really wanting to do it. I was really excited; I wanted to be booked every single day. And there was a time, maybe a couple of months later, where I had maybe four or five days off in a row. And I flipped my shit. I called Spiegler, and I’m like, ‘Yo, I cannot have four or five days off in a row. Can you book something?’”
The fighter jet inside her wanted to fly fast and high. She freely admits to liking it when she is busy at all times. She also wanted to really push herself for those first few critical months, and so she consistently worked around 27 days a month. Surprisingly, there was no negative toll from that aggressive work frenzy. If anything, she had never felt more alive and inspired.
“Porn helped with my mental health,” Dior revealed. “It made me feel enlightened and it made me feel empowered. I felt very included, like this is what I’m supposed to do. That was the main feeling throughout all of it. Going into porn the first few months, I was like so fucking comfortable. I felt no stress, which was like a huge fucking indicator that this was what I was supposed to be doing. The fact that it felt so natural, and that I wasn’t having to think too much about it, was a huge part of how I felt I was supposed to be doing porn.”
Once she established herself well and good, Dior slowed her roll to be more selective with the roles she agreed to and better appreciate the community she now belonged to. She had been in countless clubs throughout high school, even leading the youth group at her local Catholic church growing up, but she had never felt like she belonged to anything or any group.
“Porn just feels like family. This is where I feel like myself,” she related. “I also have my own personal life that is very separate from porn. There’s a very fine line between porn and my personal life. I really try to keep it separate. I really don’t have like close, close friends that I see all the time in the industry. But I would say that Spiegler is my number-one person. He really took on the role of like, my ‘dad,’ when I started porn. He was like my parent for the longest time.”
With fondness, Dior elucidated how Spiegler has been profoundly helpful with resolving personal drama, protecting her professionally and offering a huge support system that continues buoying her career and well-being.
Another influential figure in Dior’s life, later serving as muse-like fodder for her “Psychosexual” showcase, has been German-American poet, novelist and short story writer Charles Bukowski.
Harkening back to her first encounter with the gritty author’s words, Dior recalled working at a crepe restaurant back in her Alabama glory days.
“I basically ran this place,” she said. “I was on top of everything. And one day, this guy left a book on the table. I was cleaning the tables and was like, ‘What the fuck is this book?’ And it was ‘Love Is a Dog From Hell.’ I still have it. I still have the fucking book.”
Dior was quickly drawn into the raw, lyrical collection of poems, which speak to romantic angst, heartbreak and all manner of impassioned entanglements.
“I was like, ‘What the fuck am I reading?’ It was like nothing I had read before,” she said.
“I was like, ‘Who the fuck is Bukowski? I’ve gotta dig more into this.’ I read the whole book, and he was so raw. He’s very dark. He doesn’t sugar-coat shit. Now, I have like 75 percent of the books he has. All his shit is really dark.”
Much of the reason Bukowski, like Mark Spiegler, resonated with Dior, is that she really appreciates bluntness and honesty from people in her life. She also adored how Bukowski blended poetry with elements of psychology, with so many ways to read between the lines, not to mention the lines themselves.
“I’ll just read it over and over, and I’m like, ‘What does this mean? How do other people interpret this? How do I interpret this? How does the person writing it interpret this? Like, what did they mean by this?’ So, I get way into it.”
With that jagged kind of poetry, she saw a connection between her orderly military discipline and the swirling chaos that emotions can present, often at odds with the mind’s directives.
“Reading poetry made me start to understand things more and feel more grounded. If I read something, I want to know what other people think. ‘Dissect’ is the perfect word. I love to dissect everything. I want to know everything about everything.”
Just as Dior began to delve into the hidden meaning behind literature and her favorite cinematic projects, Kayden Kross joined midinterview. The conversation thus far had set the stage adroitly for a dissection of “Psychosexual.”
“Me and Kayden creating something together is pretty cool,” Dior beamed, eliciting a chuckle from Kross. “Kayden was already like the creative mastermind. To be involved in a project like this was… insane.”
Kross took that moment to explain that it was the first time she had worked with another performer to create a story based on something that performer brings to the table directly from her life, and that it was tons of fun to make.
“It’s Gianna’s story, for one,” she said. “She’s the one who brought it. And Vixen Media Group wanted to do a project with Gianna since she’s one of the top performers in the industry who hadn’t really had that massive career vehicle yet. It made a lot of sense, with the timing and who Gianna is. Additionally, she brought something so great to the table.”
Dior, who is close with one of the head honchos behind Vixen Media Group, Mike Miller, shared her ideas with him as he got to know her over time.
“I think that’s where it all stems from,” she said. “He saw that I had a story and I’ve got chaos, haha. And I honestly don’t think that this project would have worked with anyone besides Mike Miller and Kayden Kross. I don’t think this would have worked with anyone else. For some reason, Kayden, I just feel so comfortable with you. I fucking told Kayden everything about my life. I was so open and spilled everything. Usually, I don’t do that. But Kayden, I like her energy — she’s very accepting, and she’s very open. She’s very creative with everything. And I was like, ‘I’m just going to fucking spill it all.’”
Kross affirmed how raw Dior was with relaying her past, and that it allowed her to get to the real meat of who she is. With that knowledge, the director cherrypicked pieces to appear in the story similar to how they actually happened to Dior, while others are mixed up or turned around to conceal the actual circumstances that inspired them. With the canvas of multiple Vixen Media Group brands at her disposal being detailed to Kross in advance, it helped her envision the varying aesthetic choices needing to be made for each scene to carry the signature feel of its affiliated paysite.
“I put tracking marks on stories so that they would hit a particular aesthetic at a particular time — which would bring us into, say, a Tushy scene,” Kross illuminated. “Obviously, you would end everything on a Deeper scene. That’s where the whole blowup happens. So yeah, I was just making that story take the particular turns that would land in that aesthetic in the first place.”
The synopsis of the film on the sleek box cover reads as follows: “‘Psychosexual’ follows a young woman (Gianna Dior) across the span of a decade as she grapples with her sexual compulsions and the damage it wreaks on her relationships. After her behavior catalyzes a devastating loss in the days before she turns eighteen, Gianna turns inward and channels her energy toward living the boxed life she’d always mocked, marrying early and pursuing a conventional career as a sex therapist. We meet her again as she emerges a woman as educated and accomplished as she is stunning, but her outward success masks the failings of her withering marriage, her risky and illicit sex life, and the sometimesinappropriate sessions she leads with her clients.
“As if still floating on the momentum it took to fling herself off a cliff, Gianna hovers in a numbing daze of caffeine, power bars, work and after-hours sex until finally the force of gravity pulls her down on the morning her husband discovers a condom left in the toilet,” the synopsis continues. “To the day, it is exactly 10 years since her last crash, and once again Gianna finds herself alone on the rocks. This time, she resolves to pick up the pieces and find a way to rearrange them so that who she is will finally fit with the relationships she has.”
Given the complexity and sexual sizzle needed to make the above synopsis come to life in spectacular fashion, Kross and Dior underscored the importance of casting.
“Gianna, I think we were just talking about who would be good for what roles, right?” Kross asked.
“Right,” Dior replied. “Yeah, I kind of thought about who I’m good working with, and who my favorite performers are — and we fucking nailed that. Like, the casting — holy shit, I don’t think it would have worked with anybody else. We got that shit down to a tee.”
Concurring, Kross said, “Yeah, we got our first choices on cast. We knew who we were going to have as we started writing. It just worked out.”
The cast includes Avery Cristy, Troy Francisco, Mick Blue, Oliver Flynn, Jax Slayher and Rob Piper. However, one of the most prominent cast members isn’t a person at all: it’s a book by Charles Bukowski, “You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense.” It’s Dior’s favorite book and it significantly influenced the movie.
“I have a signed copy that Charles Bukowski wrote,” Dior said with pride in her voice. “One of my ex-boyfriends got it for Christmas, and it was one of the best gifts that I ever received. Can’t top it.”
Kross saw a parallel between what Gianna brings to the table, what she feels like she’s gone through at a similar stage in her own life and the themes present in Bukowski, an author she also admires.
“I identify with Gianna’s story,” Kross said. “And I get that state of mind, and being in that space. And I remember specifically there was a particular beat in the movie later; it was one of the last things I did in the edits, where we needed a breath. So I pulled a quote which is used the most in the film. It was, ‘The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.’”
The sentiment in that quote, of pulling the Band-Aid off quickly, burns in the at-times feverish narrative of “Psychosexual.”
“When I hear that quote, it’s jumping in the ice-cold pool rather than slowly lowering yourself in,” Kross reflected. “It’s the pain of intense change, quickly, with the least amount of bullshit, that is the hardest. And in the movie, Dior finally hits this spot where she just snaps.”
The potent scene she references, without delving into spoilers, came about when Kross instructed Dior to go into a room and tap into her darkness.
“We only did one take,” Kross said. “It was such a perfect performance — we’re not letting anyone mess with it.”
Even the cast and crew were spellbound during the shot, as Dior remembered, “The fucking applause after the scene was insane. I’m ripping up this calendar where I’m seeing that it’s the anniversary of when my brother died in a car accident, in my real life. And in the movie that is represented by my boyfriend dying in a car accident scene. It’s kind of my fault that he dies. I’m texting another guy, and that’s the reason the accident happens. In real life, it wasn’t my fault that my brother died. But I wanted to tie it in somehow, and I remember telling Kayden that I don’t think I can do it if it’s not personal. So that scene of me ripping up the calendar and having a panic attack was really raw and personal. That was not even acting.”
She compared such intensity to spiritually bleeding for the camera, rather than trying to perform a character.
“It goes back to when my brother died and how I felt, and all the emotions that came out,” she said. “Honestly, that was one of the only times I’ve ever let myself think about it and feel it. I just kind of push it down usually and don’t think about it because it’s a traumatic thing.”
Dior views that moment in her life as a game-changer that set her course in a very different way.
“Things that happened in my life would not have happened if he hadn’t passed,” she said. “And I just dug all that up, and I let it spill in that scene. Every time I watch it, it’s hard. That was one of the only times that I actually let myself be vulnerable like that. And I’m not known for my acting in porn. No one’s ever given me the green light on, ‘OK, you’re gonna act.’ Kayden really let me get into my acting. I was able to do porn in a whole different way. I was able to see: OK, this isn’t really porn. This is real life. We’re tying it together. Emotions are coming out. It actually doesn’t even feel like acting to me.”
Between exploring her deepest wounds and incorporating Bukowski’s heartfelt literary brilliance, Dior also wanted to incorporate Ernest Hemingway, a stark contrast. Unlike the bleeding-heart torment of Bukowski, Hemingway was more prone to writing with understated and simpler prose.
Not to mention, Hemingway was a bit of a macho badass in real life, and a product of a war-torn historical time period that influenced his writing, and that of his contemporaries, with a desire to cut clean through oily complexity, florid witticisms and over-painted waffling. Nice, clean bone.
Kross loved that dichotomy, which also constitutes Dior’s own psychological makeup as this hybrid of chaotic emotions vs. disciplined bounce-a-penny-off-the-bed soldier.
“They’re such opposites in so many ways,” she said. “I ultimately felt that Bukowski was such a fit for what was going on: that very raw, crass, exposed thing. But yeah. Hemingway and Bukowski were the two forces that illustrated just what kind of a multilayered person I’m dealing with in Dior. In fact, I don’t think I’d ever seen them paired together as an artistic influence, except by Gianna, but it gave me such a beautiful idea of who she is as a person.”
Given the grit and grandeur needed to flesh out a feature-worthy showcase, the entirety of the shoot lasted upwards of 20 days, Kross reflected. The pleasure was not all hers, as Dior gushed about being directed by such an industry great.
“Oh, my God, it was like such a fucking honor to work with Kross and be able to create shit with her,” Dior said, with her endearingly profanity-laced Bukowski style of speaking. “I kind of threw things at her, and she figured it out. She created insane things out of what I gave her. Actually, looking at the Pinterest board right now, that I created in the very beginning of the project, there’s like a Band-Aid on this person that says, ‘It still hurts.’ Random stuff like that. She can create anything out of anything. I’m looking at a battery right now and I bet you she could make an entire fucking story out of a battery.”
Kross laughed softly, and shared that her imagination is as much a product of her curiosity and desire to solve puzzles, as anything else.
“I’m one of those people who, if you leave me alone with a puzzle, I’m going to follow it until the puzzle is done,” she said. “And that’s what I loved about Gianna — Gianna gave me so many puzzle pieces. Just sitting down and having all this in front of me and making sure it’s all OK, and organizing it into a story thread — there’s nothing better. It’s far better than just being told to go and make a story by myself. It’s so much fun to be given parameters and say that this is your person, and this is who they are — and they’re this and they’re that and they’re authors and they’re writers — it’s the best. I have so much fun with that.”
Indeed, speaking to the two of them, it becomes clear how many similarities the director and star share. Each is the very picture of sculpted beauty, with a highly analytical intellect and a perfectionist drive that underpins their every move. Their respect for one another, fostered by resonating hearts, helped Dior to be open with Kross and Kross to handle that raw material deftly.
“Just the fact that Gianna trusted me enough to open up and tell me everything and know that I would treat it with care and not cross boundaries she didn’t want to cross — just being able to see this very multifaceted person in a very stark way was awesome,” Kross mused with fondness. “That’s something that you can really do something with.”
Brimming at that very moment with emotions, Dior opened up once again in front of Kross, expressing gratitude for being able to co-create with another artistically-inclined risk-taker.
“I just want to say it was such a fucking honor to work with you, Kayden,” she said. “I remember looking at all the Maitland Ward stuff you were doing, like, ‘This looks fucking amazing.’ To find myself doing a big project like this, once it all started happening and it became real, to have Kayden Kross working with me and putting together this really fucking beautiful story that came out 100 percent, I’m very, very proud of this. I’ve never done anything better than this.”
Kross expressed genuine warmth and mirrored appreciation. “It’s completely mutual. That project is what it is because of you and what you’ve brought to it. I feel exactly the same way. The fact that you trusted me with it is a massive honor. You brought absolutely everything and more to it. I consider it a perfect success. I just love the project.”
