Fresh Faces: Haley Spades

LOS ANGELES—Sometimes, Ryan Kona says, you just know. You scroll through pictures of an aspiring talent on Instagram, you have a short phone conversation and everything just feels right. Success isn’t a possibility, but a guarantee. You can sense it. That’s what Kona experienced back in February, when the Motley Models agent noticed that a striking blonde named Haley Spades had begun following the company’s various social media platforms. Kona perused Spades’ photos and immediately called company president Dave Rock. The energy in his voice was impossible to ignore. “Dave, check out these pictures!” Kona told his boss. “We’ve got to get this girl on the phone ASAP.” Rock agreed—and even discovered that Spades had already filled out a Motley application. After a few conversations with Kona, the stripper from New Orleans agreed to a contract to become the newest member of Motley’s impressive stable. Spades shot her first studio scene—a casting couch for NetVideoGirls—a few weeks later in Los Angeles. Her only prior experience in porn came during the pandemic, when she produced solo content for OnlyFans. “I was more excited than nervous,” Spades, 22, said of her debut. “I wasn’t shaky or anything. I didn’t really think too much; I just did it. It was a surreal moment. After it was over, I was like, ’Oh my God, I’m a porn star!’” Spades apparently made a strong impression, because the demands for her services have been on the rise ever since. A tango with superstar Jax Slayher for Blacked, a solo shoot for Vixen’s “Intimates” series, multiple appearances for highly-regarded studios such as Team Skeet and Adam & Eve … Spades has been slammed with opportunities. Just as Kona predicted. “She’s been killing it,” Kona says. “She’s a winner. The more we talk with her, the more we realize this girl is 100 percent right for this industry. It’s good when you bring on a new girl, and everyone is like, ‘I love this girl. I want more of her.’ That’s what we’re hearing over and over again about Haley. “It makes me feel good, because it tells me we made the right choice about bringing her on. So many times in the last five or 10 years, the wrong girls have been coming into this industry. That’s not to knock anyone else, but it’s the reality. Girls are coming in here for the wrong reasons. They’re coming in for a quick buck, or because their boyfriend wants them to do it, or they want to make their daddy mad. “Haley came in because she wants to do this. She wants to be here. She has the automatic drive to do well. She’s the total package.” And a small one, at that. At 4-foot-8 and a smidge under 100 pounds, Spades is among the smaller performers in the industry. That’s certainly not a hindrance, as some of porn’s biggest names in recent years—Gauge, Piper Perri and Holly Hendrix, to name a few—have carried similar frames. Fellow Motley girl Coco Lovelock is just 4-foot-10. So is megastar Kenzie Reeves, who is currently regarded as one of one of the elite performers in the business. “I like being this size,” Spades says. “The only issue is that directors always want the guys to pick me up and lift me high in the air. Sometimes I get scared if he’s really tall, because I’m scared of heights. If he’s a real tall dude, I’m like, ‘Please don’t drop me!’” While being petite is part of Spades’ identity, Kona said it shouldn’t define her as a performer. “Her size makes her unique,” Kona says. “But we have other petite girls in the industry. What makes them stand out is their performance. It’s that ‘extra something’ that makes them special. With Haley, the reality is that this girl could be 5-foot-10 and still be amazing. She’s that good.” A career in the adult industry hardly seemed like Spades’ calling during her younger years. She said she was an introvert growing up in tiny Covington, Louisiana, about 30 minutes north of New Orleans. She didn’t play sports in high school. Even though she had the ideal stature, she was never interested in being a gymnast or a cheerleader. But things changed after high school graduation. Spades broke up with her long-time sweetheart, moved to Baton Rouge and enrolled at LSU, a massive university with an enrollment of about 35,000 students.  “I started partying and being a little ho,” Spades said. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I like this life.’ It was unhealthy, and I hated the culture, with LSU being a big SEC school, where everything revolved around sports.” By the second semester, though, Spades had found her calling. Not in Baton Rouge, but 82 miles away in New Orleans, where the once-bashful girl with no dance experience was suddenly thriving as a stripper. Spades said she’d developed an interest in sex work a few years earlier by watching cam girls. She tried camming as soon as she turned 18 but felt awkward and quit after two attempts. Spades wasn’t exactly brimming with confidence when she sauntered onto the stage at Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club at 11:30 on a Thursday night on Bourbon Street. But she flourished, nonetheless. “I was shaking like Bambi,” Spades, who was 18 at the time, said of her initial dance. “I didn’t know how to move. I didn’t know much about dancing and I didn’t know how to walk in those big shoes. I felt like I did awful, but I got tipped and I got hired. And they kept me on the night shift, which was surprising. I guess I did something right.” Two months later, Spades switched clubs and moved down the street to Penthouse, where she danced for the next three-plus years. She became known for her sensual floor routines and pole tricks. Not once, Spades said, did she choreograph a dance. Everything just came naturally. “Dancing boosted my confidence,” Spades said. “I loved it. I felt like I was on top of the world.” By the summertime Spades decided to drop out of LSU and relocate to the Big Easy, where she enrolled at the University of New Orleans while continuing to work at Penthouse every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Spades graduated from UNO in December of 2020 with a degree in marketing, but the life experience she gained at her job was more beneficial than anything, she said. “It was like a wake up call,” Spades said. “The people I danced with were 18 to 40 years old. I heard all of their conversations, and I was like, ‘OK, people have real shit going on.’ “I gained so much wisdom and so many friendships and connections out of that. It made me grow up really fast. It made me feel more confident. It made me feel a different way about life.” The maturity Spades gained at Penthouse—and the skills she was learning in college—proved helpful when the club was forced to close during the pandemic. Like many in the adult industry, Spades was proactive and launched an OnlyFans account that featured mainly solo and cosplay content. Within months, Spades’ Twitter account ballooned from 2,000 to 20,000 followers, with her Instagram experiencing a similar swell. Spades returned to stripping when clubs re-opened over the winter but, by then, she was already thinking about taking her career to a different level. “I saw my success on OnlyFans and thought, ‘I’m already putting myself out there. Why don’t I just go do big girl things on camera?’” Spades said. “I was like, ‘OK, I look good on camera. I think I’m supposed to be in front of that camera. Let’s go for it. Let’s just fucking do it.” All of it led to Spades’ conversation with Kona and her subsequent signing with Motley Models. Spades spent three weeks in Los Angeles shooting for a variety of companies and has been back multiple times since. The more Spades shoots, the more comfortable she said she becomes. She said directors prefer for her scenes to end with facials because she has such big, pretty blue eyes. Spades said she didn’t have any sexual experiences with girls before entering the industry, so working with females has allowed her to explore her sexuality. She said she sometimes enjoys rough sex, so one of her goals is to shoot for Kink. “I like pushing boundaries,” she said. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Spades packed up her belongings at the beginning of June and made the 28-hour drive from New Orleans to Los Angeles, which is now her new home. The higher-ups at Motley were right on the money. Spades didn’t enter the adult industry just to dabble and experiment. She’s making it her life—because it’s changed her life. “Whenever I was in college,” Spades said, “I’d make jokes, like, 'I’m just going to drop out and go do porn or something.’ It’s always been in the back of my mind. I was always like, ‘Damn, that looks pretty fucking cool.’ Now I’m here, and I’m so happy.”