SITTING IN HER TRAILER final November, Dove Cameron was getting her nails carried out forward of an elaborate, cabaret-style efficiency of “Boyfriend” on the American Music Awards. She ought to have been a bundle of nervous pleasure. Instead, she felt overcome with horror.
The night time earlier than, a gunman had killed 5 individuals and injured dozens extra inside an LGBTQ+ membership in Colorado Springs. Hours later, right here she was, a queer artist surrounded by a principally queer glam crew, making ready to carry out a tune about sapphic need to a room full of superstars.
“The discrepancy between what I was doing at that moment and what was happening to these families and these people and the queer community at large watching this unfold, it just felt so unnerving,” she says. “For us to be celebrating ourselves and being like, ‘Yeah, I kicked ass this year!’ while people are literally losing their lives.”
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When Cameron’s identify was introduced because the AMA’s New Artist of the Year that night time, she felt “the only thing to do” onstage inside LA’s Microsoft Theater was to dedicate her win to the queer group, handle the Club Q tragedy and direct viewers to assets like GLAAD and The Trevor Project.
“If you have a platform, and you’re not using it, it’s a waste of a platform,” she says. “I could never have the career that I have and not be vocal. That’s just not something that I’m interested in. I would be bored.”
The emotional second capped off a yr of huge change and success for the 26-year-old artist. She ditched her signature blond hair, deleted her total solo music catalog and underwent a sonic renaissance with a slate of alt-pop singles, together with the queer anthem “Boyfriend,” which peaked at No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100; “Breakfast,” whose accompanying music video decried institutional misogyny and the dismantling of Roe v. Wade; and “Bad Idea,” a steamy ode to recklessness.
“It looks like in the public eye I made this six-month transition where I dyed my hair brown, ‘became’ gay, wrote a smash hit and then was like, ‘Fuck everybody from before. I am a villain, and you’re going to love it,’” she says. “That’s really what it looks like. And it’s just simply not true at all.”
[Photo by Jordan Knight]
CAMERON’S VILLAIN ERA seems a little bit extra tame in the meanwhile. In late December, she’s having fun with some much-needed downtime after a string of Jingle Ball performances the place she delighted in seeing impassioned audiences sing her lyrics again to her, many of them “young girls so fired up that they were quite literally screaming with brows furrowed, looking like they wanted to throw something.”
She’s chatting from her house in Los Angeles, although after greater than a decade there, the town nonetheless would not actually really feel like house. Cameron relocated to LA from the Seattle space together with her mother when she was 13 to pursue performing. She longed to maneuver to New York, however LA was the extra reasonably priced choice, in order that’s the place they went.
Within three years, she’d landed a starring position because the titular twins in 80 episodes of Disney Channel’s Liv and Maddie, which led to guide elements in Disney Channel Original Movies, together with the wildly standard Descendants franchise, and a burgeoning music profession, because of their accompanying soundtracks on Walt Disney Records. She was on a runaway prepare of success and nonstop work. And whereas she may need appeared like a bright-eyed child dwelling a dream life, the fact was rather more tough to navigate.
Her childhood pal Hayley had been murdered when Cameron was 8. And Cameron’s father died by suicide when she was 15. (She legally modified her identify from her beginning identify, Chloe Celeste Hosterman, to “Dove” to honor the nickname her dad gave her.)
As her profession took off, she did not have time to completely course of that giant trauma or are inclined to her psychological well being. Her demanding schedule left little time for remedy or introspection, and whereas she says she preferred working for Disney and has “no complaints,” the grind served as each a distraction and a catalyst for extra ache.
[Photo by Jordan Knight]
“When I was younger, I just felt incredibly pried open in an uncomfortable way, like I was being dissected on a table. And it was really, really difficult. I was really, really depressed for a very long time,” she says. “Because dealing with loss while you are also becoming somebody who’s on the TV in everybody’s household isn’t normal and healthy for a human brain.”
As the years glided by, she felt more and more suffocated attempting to keep up the squeaky clear, bubblegum blond picture her followers had grown up with. But whereas many assumed that strain got here from her Mouse House upbringing, “realistically, it probably came from me trying to be my father’s perfect daughter,” Cameron causes.
“It’s not always about my career, you know? I was trying to be the innocuous, easy to speak to, never getting in trouble, always doing what everybody wants me to be doing, people-pleasing daughter who was heterosexual, heteronormative,” she says. That was the person she was projecting in middle and high school, so when she started being on camera, “that is simply who I used to be after I confirmed up. I did not need to change it — as a result of persons are very crucial everytime you make a change.”
She’s spent the past couple of years doing what she terms “intense trauma work” and undergoing a vulnerable — at times painful — journey to finding her authentic voice, both artistically and personally.
“I ended relationship males. I got here out. I dyed my hair. I had many, many, many psychological breakdowns the place I noticed I could not hold dwelling the best way I used to be,” she says. “I reached a degree the place I noticed I actually wasn’t going to outlive if I used to be happening like that.”
[Photo by Jordan Knight]
AFTER DROPPING “BOYFRIEND” last February, Cameron and her label, Columbia’s Disruptor Records, decided to remove all of the music she had previously released as a solo artist with them — including the single “LazyBaby” and her 2019 EP Bloodshot / Waste — from iTunes, streaming platforms and YouTube.
She didn’t dislike those songs, she says, but creating them felt like “pursuing a level that I did not need as a result of I believed my mother and father would love me.” Unlike her new music, her older songs, even those she co-wrote, weren’t drawn from her personal experiences. “I did not know myself or love myself sufficient to write down about something actual as a result of I did not have entry to these elements of me,” Cameron says. “And I hated myself, so even when I attempted to, I’d be rejecting it.”
Scrapping her past work was a drastic move that she doesn’t regret, though it won’t happen again. “That was a one-time factor. It was an enormous come to Jesus scenario,” she says. “And I actually hope my followers can respect that.”
Now, she only writes music about her personal experiences, and her impending debut album is shaping up to be “method much less pop” than even the new tracks she’s released recently like “Boyfriend” and “Breakfast,” with “rather more of a ’60s, throwback really feel” in line with the inspiration for her latest single, “Girl Like Me,” a POV-flipped reimagining of Edwyn Collins’ swinging 1994 anthem “A Girl Like You.” The original Collins track found a new generation of fans, including Cameron, when it was featured in a scene in the 2003 film Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle that reveals Demi Moore’s character is actually a mastermind villain pulling all the strings.
“As a 7- or 8-year-old, my thoughts was on fireplace attempting to course of it,” Cameron says. “That scene was very tantalizing, realizing that ladies might be those in energy and the scary ones that each one males are afraid of.”
[Photo by Jordan Knight]
Cameron has always felt a special kinship with villains, even before she played the daughter of Maleficent in Descendants. She describes herself as having been “a really darkish, intense baby” who saw herself in thorny, often queer-coded characters like Edward Scissorhands, Jekyll and Hyde and Pontius Pilate in Jesus Christ Superstar. Obviously, not in the sense of longing to harm someone or commit a violent crime, she stresses, but more in “the idea of these villains having as soon as been the protagonist, after which one thing occurred, and now they’re eternally chemically altered. They’re highly effective and darkish, they usually don’t have anything to lose.”
Outside of her mainstream music career, musical theater has been a near constant in her life. She previously appeared in an LA Opera production of The Light in the Piazza with Renée Fleming, played Amber von Tussle in NBC’s Hairspray Live! and co-stars in the Apple TV+ musical anthology series Schmigadoon!, in which she’ll play an entirely new character in the upcoming season 2 that’s set in the “Schmicago” world of ’70s and ’80s musicals. While she’s technically still a coloratura soprano, she’s decided not to maintain the “monastic” lifestyle that type of voice requires to preserve, and the thought of doing a Broadway show eight times a week anytime soon makes her “need to curl up on the ground and die.”
Kristin Chenoweth, who originated the role of Glinda in Wicked on Broadway and played Cameron’s mom in both Descendants and Hairspray Live!, has acted as a mentor over the years. And in 2019, she named Cameron as her dream successor to play Glinda in the long-awaited Wicked film adaptation. It seemed a natural fit, one that Cameron previously referred to as “the position of a lifetime.” But it didn’t happen. In November 2021, Ariana Grande announced she’d won the part instead.
[Photo by Jordan Knight]
When asked if she went through the Wicked movie audition process, Cameron laughs and says, “Did I sign an NDA?” before confirming that, yes, she did audition, and no, she can’t talk about it.
“Yes. There was a really lengthy course of for, I believe, extra than simply me final yr or two years in the past, possibly,” she says. “It occurred, yeah.”
And no, for those speculating, dyeing her hair brunette a few days after the casting news was not a response to losing the part.
“I simply was carried out,” she says. “When I used to be blond, I used to be being that particular person for everyone else. When I dyed my hair, I felt like I used to be reclaiming myself as the person who I at all times have been. I believe lots of individuals need to equate that to roles or ex-boyfriends or girlfriends or some variety of branding ploy. No, babes. When you dye your hair, it modifications how you are feeling about your self. I’m identical to everyone else in that method, and I simply needed to make a name.”
She could still wear a blond wig to play Bubbles in The CW’s live-action Powerpuff Girls series — a project that has been marred by a scrapped pilot, cast exits and the network’s shifting priorities — but asking if she’s still attached to that show elicited a similarly cagey response: “I do not suppose I’ve permission to speak about that.”
[Photo by Jordan Knight]
Her focus for 2023, she says, is on putting out her album and working on various movie projects that have been delayed by her hectic music schedule. She’s also always dreamed of going to school to study fashion and creating her own line, a passion fostered by growing up with jewelry designer parents and spending countless hours in showrooms and on cutting room floors. She’d love to get other academic degrees in political science and the history of religion. And she’s finally in the process of making that long-awaited move to New York.
Basically, she’s still a work in progress. “I believe that your journey to discovering your self goes till actually the day you die,” she says. “I’ll be doing it eternally.”
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