Get to know the burgeoning star ahead of the premiere of her Apple TV+ musical comedy series
Origins
Dove Cameron found her calling early, as a kid in Bainbridge Island, Washington. “When you live in a small town, you’re either going to play an instrument, play soccer, do theater, or, I don’t know, do woodworking?” says Cameron, 25, with a laugh. “Theater just made sense. My mom said I was a very intense kid, and I needed an outlet for my emotions.” Community stages led to commercials, which led to film auditions. When she was 13, after she narrowly lost out to Hailee Steinfeld for the lead in True Grit, her mom let her give Hollywood a go. “When you’re a kid, you’re like, ‘I’m going to be on the Great White Way and the Silver Screen,’” Cameron says. “When somebody’s like, ‘Actually, maybe…’ you’re like, ‘Wait, really? Great! Let’s go to LA.’”
In the Mouse House
At 16, Cameron landed Disney’s Liv and Maddie, a tween twin comedy starring Cameron and… Cameron, Hayley Mills–style. A musical fantasy film series, Descendants, about the kids of Disney villains, soon followed, and seemingly overnight an entire generation knew her name. (She has 43 million Instagram followers.) Leaving the Disney fold after her shows ended “was really hard,” she says. “My experience was so familial—it was so safe and warm and fuzzy. It felt very intimate and low stakes. It’s only high stakes when there are 900 million people giving you the feedback that you look gross in an outfit, or you let their kid down when you said X, Y, or Z, or they hate you, or whatever.”
Broadway Baby
This month, Cameron stars in the Apple TV+ musical comedy series Schmigadoon!, in which a couple (Keegan-Michael Key and Cecily Strong) gets stuck in a magical town that’s basically a Golden Age Broadway show. Cameron plays Betsy, an aw-shucks, Ado Annie type who’s a bit too precocious for her own good. “The role is so funny,” she says. “It’s so much fun to have permission to go as broad as you possibly can.” The part also lets her combine her love for musical theater—she starred in Clueless off-Broadway in 2018 and in a West End production of The Light in the Piazza in 2019—with her TV bona fides. “It’s my absolute dream to have this weird amalgamation of both,” she says. “If I had it my way, way more shows like this would exist.”
Powering Up
Cameron’s musical efforts aren’t limited to Broadway. This spring, she released two singles, “Taste of You,” a collaboration with DJ Rezz, and “LazyBaby,” a fizzy disco-pop jam, and she has album ambitions. She also has two films in the works (the drama Field Notes on Love and the thriller Vengeance), and she just filmed a pilot for a live-action take on The Powerpuff Girls, written by Diablo Cody. “I sent it to my agency and was like, ‘We’re idiots if we don’t get on this,’” says Cameron, who had a Powerpuff Girls lunchbox as a kid. What’s her dream superpower? “I guess teleportation,” she says. “That would save me a lot of flying time—and a lot of long-distance relationship issues.”
Next Up: Actor Molly Bernard Celebrates LGBTQ+ Life in Younger and Milkwater
