Red Storm: Little Dragon on Winning Best New Int'l Starlet

A version of this feature appears in the March issue of AVN magazine. Click here for the digital edition. LOS ANGELES—Little Dragon went snowboarding in the Swiss Alps, wakeboarding in the Maldives and skydiving in Corsica—and then she engaged in high-energy sex. What looked like exotic vacations were also business trips for the stunning former beauty pageant contestant and reality TV star from Smila, Ukraine, whose remarkable first full year in the porn industry turned into one for the ages. Little Dragon authored a body of work that emphasized quality over quantity, making each performance memorable en route to the 2023 AVN Award for Best New International Starlet in January. “I was snowboarding naked in Switzerland Alps and it was my first blowjob on the slope,” Little Dragon recalls of her scene with AVN Award-winning performer Alberto Blanco for Vixen. “It was such a nice view—it was wow. It’s not just porn. What I like about it is that it shows my personality.” Dragon tells AVN that thanks to her friend Julia Grandi, the veteran Vixen Media Group director, her entry into professional adult entertainment in 2021 could not have gone any better. “I don’t have to play someone,” she says. “It’s a movie, I’m an actress. But I get to be me and it’s wonderful. Like all this crazy stuff, all my skills like snowboarding, wakeboarding and skydiving—Julia made it happen.” All but a couple of Little Dragon’s initial twenty-something sex scenes have been for VMG as she has recorded multiple appearances on Slayed, Blacked, Tushy, Deeper and Vixen. She also made two appearances on the sci-fi-meets-porn site, Hentaied.com. Little Dragon met Julia Grandi and Jia Lissa, the two-time AVN Award-winning star, at a birthday party for a mutual friend on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus—in 2018. Jia and Dragon both were shooting for Playboy while at the party. “But I was never thinking that I was gonna do porn,” Dragon says. The group saw each other again at a soiree in Ibiza during the Gumball 3000 rally in 2019—a two-day car race starting in Mykonos that included sponsors such as Pornhub, Brazzers and Vixen. “And Jia Lissa wasn’t the only girl I knew from the industry. I knew Liya Silver as well,” Dragon says. “Even if I am in a different area of my life, I wasn’t connected to porn. We still like best friends and I was supporting [Jia] and she was supporting me.” Flash forward to the first year of the pandemic and Dragon had recently broken up with her most recent boyfriend when she flew to Tulum in October 2020 on a quest for anal sex—and a DP. “I just want to experience it,” Dragon recalls thinking. “And instead of like searching some adventures in my ass with random people… not random, but even people who I know but it’s hard to make it happen in real life. Like how can I find two guys to fuck me at the same time? “Who they gonna be, does they know what is anal… because I have already experienced with my [previous] ex-boyfriend who doesn’t know and I lost interest with anal for five years. “I didn’t want it to happen again. I wanted someone who knows what to do.” So in early 2021 when Julia Grandi ventured to Tulum for vacation, Dragon felt ready to entertain the porn discussion. The two went to dinner and began considering the possibilities of Dragon making her debut for VMG. “And that’s how we ended up with the idea that I’m gonna shoot for her production,” Dragon says. “So on one hand it was perfect because Julia, she was bringing me to the best locations, giving me the best guys, filming the best movies. “And then like, OK, I like it. And on the top, she’s paying me money. And I’m like, OK, I like this idea. “And because I had friends in the industry, I saw how they working. I was working already for content in OnlyFans.” ***Dragon, who posted naughty clips on a premium Snapchat account prior to OnlyFans, says she wanted a DP on camera from the get-go. “I was asking [Julia] about DP—I wanted two guys at the same time,” Dragon reveals. “And she’s like, ‘Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? You want to start career and you want to do hardcore from the first time?’ “And I’m like, ‘I just want to explore. I just want to entertain.’ For me, it was the way. I was searching for some adventures because I broke up with my lover. We had all these experiences together. “And then when we broke up, I’m like fuck, I cannot like fuck around and search for this in real life. And at the same time in my life I met Julia in Tulum. And we was talking a lot. I was sharing my stories with her. “And she’s like, ‘You should try. It’s yours. Let’s do it.’ And I’m like, ‘OK, let’s do it. I will try one time. If I feel comfortable with this, it will be my career.’” It’s safe to say that Little Dragon has settled in. It turns out she’s a natural when the cameras roll—and Grandi had a hunch that she would be. “Oh, my little girl Dragon!” Grandi, who also owns the Budapest, Hungary-based JulModels, tells AVN. “I miss her so much, as we became really good friends and I know her career started because as friends we have built trust to each other. “I had a feeling that she will be great even before her first scene but when I saw how this girl enjoys sex on camera—wow, just wow!” Julia continues, “We shot amazing content over all sites at Vixen Media Group and every scene is truly a piece of art! “Then due to the world situation she had to move to the U.S. and I knew it will be new chapter in her life. I was watching all her U.S.-made scenes and was so, so proud of ‘my girl.’ “I had no doubt she will be nominated and win an AVN as she is truly one unique actress that delivers 100 percent energy, creativity and love. “We are in constant contact with her and I am always checking on her new life in the U.S. and her career steps. I’m missing her in my movies and my life but I wish her the best and a big success in U.S. adult industry.” ***Little Dragon attended the 40th annual AVN Awards Show on January 7 in Las Vegas for the first time—she moved to L.A. from Tulum with a small group of friends and her beloved late sphinx cat, Freya, in April 2022. “On AVN I didn’t feel good, I had like a huge pain in my stomach,” Dragon recalls. “And I was sitting and I forgot that I was nominated also. Guys give me like some painkiller and I become alive again and at the same moment when I’m alive I see on the screen I won Best International Starlet and then like, wow! I woke up. “And I’m like, is it for real? And then Julia Grandi was calling me like, ‘Congratulations!’ And again I started to cry. And I’m like, OK, it feels real. “So I think only because of this it was so unexpected…” Dragon admits she imagined herself winning the award—ahead of the show she even created a mood board with stickers on the back of her phone as both a reminder and a motivator about the upcoming occasion at AVN. “I wanted it,” Little Dragon says. “I wanted it so much and when you get it… For example when you are working very hard on something like this, it’s like you prove that you’ve done enough. Because sometimes you’re doing something and you don’t see feedback from the fans, from the people. You don’t see like appreciation. “I give to my work not 100 percent, but like 200 percent of myself. Especially because it was my first AVN show and because I am experiencing everything for the first time in America. That to me was very special. I’m very grateful.” Christian Clay, the veteran deal-closer from Naples, Italy, who has done hundreds of scenes for VMG, found out first-hand what kind of energy Dragon brings to the set. He did the honors for her first anal scene for Tushy. “I actually met her for the first time in Budapest with Jia Lissa, but back on that time she wasn’t performing,” Clay, a multiple AVN Award-winner with more than 20 years of experience, tells AVN. “As I remember she was just doing some nude modeling. Then when she started to be a performer I was in contract so I could be her first choice, but I guess she would choose me because then she did for her first Tushy. “It was such a hot scene. She is a mix of sensuality, passion and a hot lover. She is an amazing performer. She is another girl I would recommend to shoot. She loves sex and she loves what she does. I never see someone so crazy like her in a good way. I mean she love sports and I like girls like her. “I would say to her, be like you are, never change. We miss girls like you. I hope we can work soon together again.” ***Little Dragon tells AVN quarantine allowed her to re-evaluate what she was doing with her life and look inward. “Most of the time you are going somewhere,” she says. “But I never had time just to sit and like watch something, read something, write something, ask myself about what I want to do in my life. What my dreams, how to get them. Like many questions.” Dragon continues, “I was meditating a lot. But not like meditation like yoga. I don’t do yoga. I wrote like my own prayers. “Which every day I am praying and it fills me with energy. It’s about gratitude, it’s about love. It’s about turning yourself on the highest frequency. “That I don’t care what happened outside, I’m strong enough to keep my aura wonderful and love and with a good vibe. And it’s true, because everything comes from within. And I always believed in that and it’s true. But only on quarantine when I started to love my own ways because I didn’t find anything that fits me. Like all religions, I didn’t like them. “Like I respect them but all of them about something but not fit my life. And when I didn’t find, I decided just to write it by myself.” *** Dragon’s cat Freya gave birth to five kittens in Tulum in March 2022 when she was on her way to the airport to go shoot her first DP in the Caribbean. It took only a matter of a few weeks for her to find homes for all the kittens. And in April of last year, Dragon came to LA for the first time—with Freya. Not long after Little Dragon arrived, she flew to San Francisco to do some assistant work, leaving her cat at home with a close friend. Somehow Freya got out of the house and was tragically hit by a car; she was only two years old. “It was hard to accept because she was my kid,” Dragon says. “I was traveling with my cat everywhere, even on production. It was like Mexico, Paris, Budapest, Mykonos. We went to all these places together and this situation like in America put me in depression but I accepted. I accepted very fast. I started to work.  “Slayed was my first movies, I shot two scenes for Slayed. And at summer I shot Deeper and Tushy Raw. It was wild. I’m impressed by Deeper—by Kayden Kross, by Maitland Ward.” Today she still wears a gold ring made with Freya’s likeness. *** Dragon, who has a master’s degree in Laboratory Diagnostics, reveals she wanted to pursue a career in the medical field. “I was dreaming to be a doctor like from my childhood. I was enjoying studying a lot. But when I finished university I turn a different way and it’s amazing,” she says. The rising star tells AVN she had to “beg” her mom to go to medical college. “And she was like, ‘No, no, no, you’re gonna kill people.’ Like no one in my family never consider me a responsible person,” she recalls. “I’m the smallest… I have a sister, she’s like older five years than me. And she would study in school perfectly. And I was like the worst. She was always listening to mom and I don’t. “I wasn’t like bad kid. I was respecting my mom but still I allowed myself to enjoy my life from the childhood. And I’m grateful to my mom. She was never against the guys, she was more against girls. … She’s a hater of the girls.” Dragon considered her mom “like a superhero for working two jobs at the same time.” “She still made mine and my sister life so amazing. Her love for us is like wow,” the performer adds. After Little Dragon earned her master’s diploma she moved to Kyiv, Ukraine for one month to compete in the Queen of Ukraine beauty contest—one of about 15 she has entered since 2015—and then she did a handful of reality TV shows such as The Bachelor and How to Get Married. “The best beauty contest I have ever done it was in South Korea and I fell in love with Korea forever,” Dragon says. *** Her distinctive tattoo that graces her left hip and upper leg is a girl dragon—inspired by Freyja, the Norse goddess of love—that she prepared for one month in 2020. “I found a nice girl, she’s an artist. She was drawing a sketch for me. I sent her a dragon. I sent her a girl with wings… I sent her some symbols. I explain what I want and she says, ‘OK I will make a sketch for you,’ Dragon says. “She give better, but it was in my imagination. Every day she was drawing something and then I was like correcting some things.” The tattoo makes use of symbolism such as the four elements, new moon, full moon and old moon “like the present cycle of life,” Dragon continues. She also tattooed three numbers hidden on the girl’s collar denoting “power, money and sex.” “I hide it because no one knows,” Dragon says. “These are powerful numbers. There is nothing bad with the money if you know how to use and nothing bad if you use it for the best and good intentions and use it to make the world better. There is nothing wrong with the sex if you enjoy it.”In addition, the tattoo features a key in the shape of a trident—a symbol of Ukraine that means power. “I’m powerful enough to open any heart I desire is this meaning of all this tattoo,” Dragon explains. “After I did this tattoo I realize this was the perfect spot for this. "Because when I’m standing this girl also standing; when I raise my leg this girl also raise the leg. It’s really powerful. Funny I made this tattoo from the money which I won in poker the night before. And this tattoo reminds me that I’m lucky also and I really love it.” She also has a tattoo on her shoulder blade that she got when she was 20 of a unicorn and a fairy. Dragon felt compelled to get that tattoo after an unwanted encounter while jogging. “This situation pushed me to think about tattoo but I wanted some protection,” Dragon says. She tells AVN one of her biggest passions is creating one-of-a-kind “pussy art” using acrylic paint. “I sit on canvas and I’m making video of how I’m drawing,” she says. “And then selling my art with the video how I made it.” Photography by Vixen Media Group & @ger.arte