Our autumn cover star Dove Cameron shares her thoughts on finding balance

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Dove Cameron has lived several lives already. Actor, singer, songwriter—yes—but also something more difficult to define: a young woman who has grown up in public while privately learning how to hold grief, ambition and self-belief all at once. There is a steadiness to her now, a sense that the person speaking has fought to find balance and locate her own centre. Growing up on Disney Channel meant spending more than half of her life in the spotlight, shapeshifting to fit roles, expectations and narratives. But it is only now, with the release of 56 Days and a body of music that feels unflinchingly her own, that she seems to be entering a different era entirely—one defined not by proving herself to an audience, but by proving something to herself.

She wasn’t born Dove Cameron—her real name is Chloe, but Dove was her father’s pet name for her, and it suits her too. She is like a Dove, peaceful and spirited. She changed her name to Dove after her father’s tragic suicide, shortly before she began what would become a decade-and-a-half-long career in the public eye. Names can be armour, and they can be offerings. For Dove, it seems like both. A tribute and a becoming. A way of carrying grief forward without letting it calcify. Dove Cameron is the latest in a long line of child stars coming into their own post-Disney, though ‘latest’ feels misleading—she has, in many ways, already lived several careers. She was just 17 when she was cast in Liv and Maddie on the Disney Channel, playing identical twins with wildly divergent personalities, and the projects that came after followed in this same high-gloss, high-pressure trajectory: Descendants, tours, red carpets, the kind of schedule that could easily swallow adolescence whole.

It must have been scary, entering this world so young, I suggest. But fear, she tells me—and we’ll soon discover this is a theme that we keep coming back to in our conversation—propels her forward. She’d never let it be the thing that stops her from taking a role, from writing a song. ‘Fear is the thing that's trying to keep me exactly where I am,’ she explains. ‘I learned at a very young age that staying exactly where I am is the last thing that I'm interested in doing.’ There is no bravado in the way she says it either. It is simply the truth. Fear, for Dove, is fuel. I’m curious to know if it would ever stop her from doing anything, if she’d say no because of it. ‘If I'm afraid of not being able to do it, I will always say yes and then find myself capable on the other side,’ and that, she explains, is the dream. This mindset has become her through-line. As a teenager, it meant walking onto sets surrounded by adults and trusting that instinct would meet preparation. As a musician in her twenties, it has meant exposing parts of herself that once felt too tender to articulate. As a woman now at the beginning of her 30s, it looks like something else entirely: discernment.

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Fifteen years into her career, Dove speaks with the clarity of someone who has finally located her centre. It must be a strange feeling, more than 15 years in and only now finding your feet, I suggest, but she laughs gently at the framing. For her, this moment is not overdue; it is right on time. It is exciting—full of promise about what comes next. One of the inflection points was 56 Days, her latest series that required her to abandon the sheen of her earlier roles and lean into something far murkier. ‘It was really the first time that I was like, ‘Oh, I can do this,’’ she tells me. The psychological thriller premiered on Prime Video last month and immediately became one of the platform’s most talked-about series, comfortably maintaining pole position on the platform globally. Based on the bestselling novel by Catherine Ryan Howard, the eight-episode show follows Dove as Ciara and Oliver (Avan Jogia) after a chance meeting in a supermarket sparks an intense, whirlwind romance that takes a dark turn when a decomposing body is discovered in Oliver’s apartment exactly fifty-six days later. The story shifts between the past and present, blending erotic passion with mystery and murder, and demands emotional vulnerability at every turn—something the actor has described as both ‘challenging’ and deeply formative. What made the project particularly meaningful for Dove was the almost serendipitous way the role came to her: the show’s co-creator, Karyn Usher, had once wanted to cast her in a completely different series when she was just 14, and reconnected unexpectedly years later to offer her the part. Dove has called the casting ‘a Hollywood fever dream,’ telling outlets on the press tour she found Ciara’s complexity irresistible and that she was ready—emotionally and creatively—to tackle something that pushed her beyond what she thought she was capable of. It comes back to that through line of fear. ‘Every time you scare yourself or you put yourself in a position to sink or swim, you're not proving it to an audience or to a director—you're proving it to yourself.’ In many ways, this is the thesis of her life so far. 

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Acting, she explains, then becomes an act of release— especially when playing a character as raw and nuanced as Ciara. ‘My emotions are like this little alien that is always moving and growing and breathing without my consent,’ she says. ‘If I don't look for outlets to put it into, it will live in me and fester and I feel unexpressed.’ She is quick to clarify that she’s ‘really 0% method’. For her, authenticity is not about carrying a character home or collapsing the boundary between fiction and reality, it’s about presence, working through what’s going on. ‘If you are present enough and the lines are emotional enough and you are truthful enough, there's something in your nervous system that will take over and give an authentic line read.’ It’s interesting to note how open Dove has been about taking on this role too, and the energy that bubbled behind the scenes. She’s taken to watching the series along with her fans on Instagram, inviting them to join her for Q&As, where she shared the inner makings of the works, the unpacking she had to do around intimacy, the playlists and the journals she created for Ciara. For fans who have been with her since they were children, it’s a really sweet moment. Refreshing. I ask her how the creative outlet of acting mirrors that of her music—and the ways in which it is different too. After all, a TV show is created with a massive crew. Songwriting feels perhaps more personal, honest, in its opportunity for expression. If acting is a form of exorcism, would music be her confession? ‘In my music right now, I think I've never been so honest,’ Dove admits. “and that's not because before I wasn't interested in being honest, but before, I wasn't capable of distilling it into what I meant.’ It’s bravery in itself, no character to shield behind, no script to soften the edges. Rather, she’s learning to take any residual fear in her stride to create work that feels authentic, that feels like Dove. ‘Everything that's ending up on this album is my intimate life report, and if it's not exactly what I mean, it doesn't end up on the record.’ She mentions something else—a comparison that really helps me understand the balance she has to find between music and acting. ‘You create a show to do well and to get people to watch it. You create an album because you mean it.’ I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anyone phrase it like that before, but it really resonates. 

Interviewed by Tessa Patrick

Photography DAVIS BATES

Styling MARC ERAM

Hair NATHANIEL DEZAN

Makeup TAMI EL SOMBATI

Videography DANIEL WAYNICK

Executive Producer TIM PHIN

Producer STEVEN FERNANDEZ

Contributing Fashion Director AMBER BAKER

Location L’ERMITAGE BEVERLY HILLS

TO BE CONTINUED…