Gal Ritchie: The Best New Starlet Interview

This is the cover story of the April 2025 issue of AVN magazine. LOS ANGELES—Gal Ritchie likes the structure that professional porn provides her. “I’m someone who really needs routine in my life,” she says. “Some days are longer than others, especially with features, but most of the time it’s kind of like a 9-to-5—a sexual 9-to-5.” No matter what shift Ritchie worked during her first year-and-a-half in Porn Valley she did it with a smile—and it’s safe to say she earned a promotion. The 23-year-old British flirt took home the most coveted award for a new performer in adult entertainment in January, winning the 2025 AVN Best New Starlet crown at the 42nd annual AVN Awards Show in Las Vegas. Even seven weeks later, Gal says everything that happened that weekend feels a bit foreign to her. “I’m going to be honest, it still feels really surreal,” she tells me. “I wish I could sit here and say I processed it, and it feels like this and this, but it still feels a bit like a dream, which I think is a testament to how much it meant to me. “I know the more cool thing to do is act very nonchalant and act like it was easy. But I worked very hard for that and I wanted it, I wanted it so bad. “And I know that’s not the cool thing to say, but it’s true.” Ritchie looks casually chic in her dark leather jacket, grey t-shirt and blue jeans as she enjoys an early lunch of Yellowfin tuna salad at a busy Woodland Hills restaurant. As down-to-earth and funny as anyone in the industry, Ritchie broke into adult in the summer of 2023 armed with smoldering looks, a passion for sex work, big ambitions and an engaging personality to match. The former dominatrix and software engineer recruiter remembers watching the AVN Awards on cable TV in her hometown—a village of about 2000 residents near Brighton, England. “And I’d see these beautiful women standing on stage, accepting those awards and I was just thinking how proud they are of expressing their sexuality, and what a feat that is, and how amazing it looks,” Gal recalls. “So it was always a dream of mine, but I never thought it would become a reality at all.” All of that changed on Saturday, January 25th at The Theater at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, where Ritchie not only won the top award for a new female performer, she also picked up a trophy for Best Foursome/Orgy Scene for her efforts in Brazzers’ epic “20 for 20” throwdown. “When I first told my mum—or even the few weeks after and I was going to set—I felt like I was lying,” Ritchie says with a laugh. “And it still feels a bit like that now. … I still can’t believe it. Like even talking about it makes me stutter.” But Gal’s body of work began to speak for itself during her breakout year in 2024 as she shined in dozens of scenes for influential studios en route to 90-something credits during the eligibility period—at press time she had about 150 overall. A self-proclaimed “workaholic,” Gal delivered time and again for blue-chip brands such as Brazzers, Reality Kings, Vixen Media Group, Girlsway, Jules Jordan and Evil Angel. She demonstrated the same comfort level in the BDSM realm of Kink.com as she had on the set of the high-profile feature, Gold Diggers, the Digital Playground production that received the 2025 AVN Award for Grand Reel—the highest annual honor for a narrative movie. And she showed that she handles dialogue with the same enthusiasm as she approaches uninhibited sex. “I’m someone who, if I hone in on something, I really want to do it, I want to do it to the point where I’m the best,” Ritchie says. That kind of winning attitude and determination soon became obvious to her co-stars, many of whom already consider Gal to be one of the best in the world. “Gal Ritchie is one of those rare and authentic talents who truly stand out,” says the reigning AVN Male Performer of the Year Vince Karter. “Passionate, full of drive, and always smiling, she makes a strong impression from the very first meeting. “The first time I met her, I was immediately struck by her vibrant presence and sense of humor. We were filming a scene with comedy and the intimate part only began after several hours on set. When that moment came, it was a shock—in the best way. Behind her funny and endearing personality was a true powerhouse once the cameras started rolling.” Veteran Brazzers exclusive Scott Nails, who did a three-way with Ritchie and Kimmy Granger in Gold Diggers and was inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame in January, tells AVN, “Dude, I love Gal. She’s always good energy. She’s a great professional with a great heart. She’s funny, engaging, not boring, just a great girl.” Meanwhile, fellow Brazzers contract stud Alex Jones tells AVN, “I love her, she deserves everything happening for her right now and I absolutely loved shooting with her recently for Brazzers as well!” “My first impression of Gal was that she was incredibly attractive but also incredibly sweet, which is usually hard to come by,” Jones continues. “Since then, we’ve shot together a couple of times, but our recent shoot for Brazzers was probably my favorite. “It was a POV shoot and I was a little bummed that we could only do POV positions, but she has such a perfect way of engaging with her scene partner. It’s hard for the scene to be anything less than incredible! I’m hoping we get booked together more often.” Fellow ZZ deal-closer Ricky Johnson agrees. He already has worked with Ritchie six times. “Gal Ritchie just won Best New Starlet, but I think she’s still underrated,” Johnson tells AVN. “She has such a great aura to her that just oozes superstar. “She’s one of my favorite people to work with. All of our scenes are just so effortless. She’s easy to work with, so bubbly and breathtakingly beautiful. Also she’s hilarious, which is a bonus. I’m excited to see her continue to shine.” Ritchie’s path to adult stardom started on a live cam site at 18, when she noticed many fans were requesting that she conduct more “dominant” cam sessions for them. They wanted to see her act “bitchy” and “bratty.” “And I had a few guys who basically said, ‘Would you be up for doing this in person?’ And I impulsively was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it.’ I didn’t really give it too much thought to be honest. “And so I went and I met up with one guy and did a session with him, which was probably one of the most unsafe things I’ve ever done,” Ritchie recalls, laughing. “I just went up to London in my little outfit from my village and met this random guy and I think we did like an hour session together.” She adds, “It was nothing too intense, it was corporal punishment. And then he said, ‘You know, you’re really good at this. You can have a career in this if you wanted.’ And I hadn’t really thought about that.” Not long after that she enrolled in the London School of Domination—and about six months later got certified as a Domme. “So I still have this huge certification in my bedroom back home in England and then I started building up clients from there,” Ritchie says. “I would work in specific dungeons that the clients knew would provide dommes that know what they’re doing. I also had to take health and safety courses. So I did that for I think about a year-and-a-half.” Ritchie thrived with the performative aspects of domming, but she became fatigued with the enormous amount of bespoke requests. “I would have these guys sending me pages and pages of scripts to learn and be like, you can say this but not this… Like you were expected to be able to remember stuff and not cross certain boundaries and really be on the ball with it,” Gal says. “And I just got really burnt out, I kind of got tired of having to perform this character all the time. And because I’m not naturally dominant, it really was a performance every day.” When she decided to take a break from domming, she landed a job doing recruitment for software engineering positions with major tech companies such as Meta. “But my heart was very much still interested in sex work,” Gal admits. So at night she began studying the careers of a few of adult’s contemporary greats such as Angela White and Abella Danger “who have done the best or have been most successful.” “Alongside that it seemed like they really enjoy what they do and they love the sex,” Ritchie says. “It’s not a facade they’re putting on, it’s who they are. And then I started looking at who represented them, and Mark Spiegler’s name came up. “I’m someone who researches everything before I do it, slightly neurotically, I will say. So I watched like every documentary, every interview, every podcast, any media that was on Mark Spiegler, I read and watched it, listened to it.” She was 19. “I always was very fascinated from a young age of women that express their sexuality in a very creative manner, or the women that don’t succumb to the stigma of the shame that society embeds in them when they express themselves sexually,” Gal explains. “And luckily for me, my mum is very supportive. So when I was younger and expressed these interests or questions or curiosity within the realm of sex work—not necessarily doing sex work—but just the women within the framework of it, she was very supportive.” Ritchie’s mother even took her to burlesque shows and feminist lectures. “And I always really appreciated that. Because then when I did want to go into domming professionally, I spoke to her about it and she was very helpful in the way that she also made it clear that it’s not the norm,” Gal says. “… But my mum didn’t come from the norm. My mum dropped out of school at 14, well, she got kicked out of school at 14. And ended up going to art college and now she has a PhD and she’s a college professor.” “So she didn’t necessarily do things the correct or society’s standard way, but she still ended up somewhere very successful, very happy and safe. And I think that’s what she finds important for me.” So it came as no surprise on her night of triumphs that Ritchie made her first phone call to her mother. “I woke her up, but she was expecting it,” Gal says. “She was like, ‘Regardless what happens, tell me. I’m proud of you.’ Because even nominated is such a massive thing. There’s so many new girls that join the industry every year, so even to be in that select few to get nominated for your award is such an honor. “And it was a tough crowd this year, you know, every year is, but there were some big names that I was up against, so I wasn’t that confident. And, yeah, my mum was like crying, I was crying.” So was her agent Mark Spiegler, and the 2016 Best New Starlet Abella Danger, and Ritchie’s best friend from home, Molly, who traveled to Vegas to support her. “I have this fantastic video that Abella filmed. And you can hear her crying in the video, and then she gets Mark crying, and then she gets a few of the other girls crying, and my best friend from England came to the award show with me, and she was sobbing,” Gal continues. “She couldn’t even get her camera out, she has this one-second video of her shaking. But yeah, incredible. She was over the moon. And the rest of my family are.” Ritchie even shared the news with her grandparents. “They don’t quite understand what I do, but they think I do more softcore stuff. I have tried to explain to them, but I’ll leave them with what they think I do, which is fine. I’m not going to force them to think about hardcore stuff,” Gal says. “But they know that I won an award and I did very well and they’re so proud of me. So that was really nice.” When the show was over, Ritchie joined many of her fellow Spiegler Girls at a restaurant in the hotel before Abella Danger & Co. whisked her away to the XS nightclub inside the Wynn Hotel & Casino. Danger left nothing to chance for the victory party, asking for the staff to bring out bottles of champagne and a sparkling sign with Ritchie’s name. “I remember meeting Gal the first day she ever came to LA and just hearing how passionate she was about beginning her journey in the industry,” Danger tells AVN. “And I remember being that girl and I could just see that she was such a passionate person and I knew she was going to be such a good performer. So it’s been so amazing to watch her blossom and become so successful.” Abella continues, “I was so nervous that night. I wanted her to win so badly.” Spiegler recalls how Danger—who has become one of the most successful performers of all time—took an immediate interest in Ritchie. “She met her right at the beginning and took her under her wing from Day 1,” Spiegler, who now has represented seven Best New Starlet winners, tells AVN. “She posted on Instagram and tweeted about her and got her like 7,000 followers overnight…. It was quite a start.” When Ritchie first moved to LA in August 2023, she lived at Spiegler’s apartment for six months. “I’ve done this for other girls but more so for her because she’s not from here, she’s foreign,” Spiegler explains. “It’s like being a baby in a whole new land. You don’t know how to catch a bus or pay taxes. Everything is kind of different, so I take more care of them in the short term and hopefully they flourish.” Ritchie tells AVN Spiegler could not have taken any better care of her during that first six months. “I lived with him for a long time,” she says. “He was like my family, my friend—I didn’t know anyone. He’d drive me to work, everything. He was incredible.” A Brazzers rep calls Gal “the quintessential girl next door with an insatiable British wit.” And the ZZ brass would know as she’s become a go-to girl for Aylo’s suite of brands. Ritchie already has nine scenes for Brazzers, seven for sister brand Reality Kings, two for Digital Playground and three for the all-girl Twistys, where she was named Treat of the Month in August 2024. “Gal Ritchie brings the perfect blend of charm, humor and sensuality every time she’s on a Brazzers set,” the ZZ rep says. “Gal’s versatility is her greatest strength as she excels in any scene type she’s cast in. We’re always excited to see what’s next for Gal as there seems to be no limit to what she can accomplish in her career.” Seth Gamble, the 2023 AVN Male Performer of the Year and seasoned director who also owns Lucid Flix, knows Ritchie’s range as well as anyone. He has performed with Gal five times and cast her in a supporting role in his biggest directorial project to date, Once Upon a Time in the Valley, which will be released this summer through Wicked Pictures. “The reason I wanted to cast Gal is she hits every note,” Gamble tells AVN. “She’s got the energy, the charisma, the mentality, she has it.” Seth continues, “Honestly, Gal is amazing. She wants to come and give 110 percent. She doesn’t complain. She’s a fun person to be on set with. I always want her in anything I can put her in. “She is becoming one of my favorite performers in general. I just see the way she operates in this industry and she’s doing movie and studio work as seriously as anyone ever has, which is not the usual. It’s not the rule anymore, it’s the exception, so it’s amazing to see someone that motivated.” In Once Upon a Time, Ritchie plays “the classic star that comes into the industry who will do whatever it takes to get to the top and it doesn’t always go her way.” Gamble paired Ritchie with the hard-charging Zac Wild, who plays the MC at a strip club. Wild tells AVN Ritchie is “magnificent.” “A dark-haired beauty with marvelous green eyes, sexy, suave, coy, cute and a wondrous whore with a fun and sarcastic attitude—I love it!” Zac says. “Our scenes are visceral, honest and hot! I know that every time I see her name on my call sheet it’s going to be a lovely day.” Photography by Dean Capture