Autumn cover star Dove Cameron on finding balance and what beauty really means at this point in her life

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.

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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.

And it makes me excited for any music that might be coming next—but she doesn’t give anything away.

‘If an album works, it's a good thing,’ she goes on to explain. ‘But also, if an album doesn't work, it still remains true and good, because objectively, it's still a living, breathing thing forever out in the world changing.’ It’s a different measure of success to acting, a different timeline.

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Dove’s resilience becomes immediately clear as we move into more personal terrain. She’s the first to admit she’s really had to work through some trauma in her life—her father’s suicide when she was 15, the loss of her childhood best friend to domestic violence, the sudden passing of her former Descendants co-star Cameron Boyce. Grief has been a constant companion.

It would be easy to craft a narrative of survival here, to frame her as phoenix-like. But she resists the simplicity of that arc. This, for her, like fear, is not something conquered—it is something integrated. I once read a line that said, ‘what is grief if not love persevering’, and Dove is the embodiment of this. After all, she is in the most love-struck era of her life, announcing her engagement to Måneskin frontman Damiano David this January, and amid the busy press cycle for 56 Days (Jimmy Fallon, Call Her Daddy, Remix), it’s something she’s had to learn to share the right snippets of along the way, and not let the excitement totally take over.

I’m curious as to how a relationship like theirs can maintain its own sense of self, to not let the intimacy of their personal lives spill out into the busyness of the open. ‘Our relationship is ours, and it is completely private, no matter how much of it people feel like they see or know—they will never see or know it.’ It’s not a defensive tactic, but rather a sense of preservation, of respect for this beautiful life she has built.

For someone who grew up with cameras charting her adolescence, this insistence on boundaries feels right. She speaks candidly about past relationships, too—ones that many saw snippets of playing out—with a softness that suggests distance has brought clarity. It would be fair to suggest that, like anyone, time and people have shifted Dove’s perspective of love.

‘I can look back now and confidently say I was in love, but it is not at the capacity that my relationship is at now.’ Capacity. It’s a word therapists love. It implies growth, expansion, the stretching of emotional muscle. The love she inhabits now feels, by her own account, deeper, steadier. Less about intensity, more about alignment.

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Speaking of alignment, Dove and I both turned 30 this last year—’Happy Saturn return girl!’ she quips when I tell her that I, too, am at a similar stage of life right now. Our conversation, at its core, was really just two girls yapping about woo woo planets and the joys of being creative. But this is to note that our thirties are weird ideas that live in our heads, we spend our twenties thinking they’re so old, that they’re the beginning of the end. And then it’s your birthday, and you’re so excited about everything to come.

For Dove, one of the most significant relationships she is tending to at present is the one she has with herself. ‘The version of myself that I'm trying to build right now is someone who is good to myself above all things,’ she tells me.

Child stardom often demands pliability. You are the character, the brand, the press soundbite. You become adept at reading rooms, at anticipating needs. For Dove, untangling herself from that reflex has been deliberate work.

‘I really saw myself as this mutable, changeable thing that was at the disposal of what everyone else needed—and now I'm finally figuring out things like balance.’ She tells me that it’s been a big chapter of her life, learning to understand what is the anxiety of the moment, rather than trauma that she’s had to learn to navigate.

‘I've had to really work to disentangle my inherent value from my work output or the perceived audience reaction to what I do,’ she tells me. ‘I've finally gotten my own centre of self-worth—kind of—in my root chakra. It feels instinctual at this point, rather than me searching for it blindly in the dark.’

Again, we return to the body, the root chakra, the nervous system. Her language is spiritual, yes, but also grounded. It’s a revitalising conversation for anyone to be having, and one I think that feels relatable, no matter the stardom of the listener. 

This embodied understanding of herself inevitably shapes how she views the world. It’s not insular either—the world, her country, it’s going through a lot at this time. Political polarisation, social unrest, the pervasive hum of collective anxiety. ‘Everything that keeps us tied to our humanity is the most necessary act of rebellion right now,’ she says, a restrained statement in itself.

Because that is just one more part of what makes Dove so brilliant. She is not afraid to talk about the hard pieces too—the politics, the dehumanisation of it all. But she is wary of despair as a permanent state. ‘We just can't fall into the trap of despair for too long,’ she suggests. ‘We have to find ways to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and hold each other's hands.’

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It brings us back to that through-line of fear, and the way that the people we become are shaped by how we respond to it. Because if there is a theme to be understood about Dove Cameron’s life so far, it is not Disney or pop stardom or the grief that one can linger on. It’s evolution, and finding balance among it all.

As she finishes up in hair and makeup, I ask her what she hopes this next era might look like—not in terms of charts or casting calls (although, between friends, watch this space), but internally. She doesn’t hesitate. She tells me that she wants to be good to herself. To protect her centre. To create because she means it. To love expansively but privately. To stay human in a world that often rewards the opposite. Her defiance is simply joyous.

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