The Art Of Being Dove Cameron

You might think you know Dove Cameron, but the actor and singer has come a long way to show you who she really is — in all her unedited, unapologetic, and uncompromising glory

- Farisa Thang

The thing about being in the spotlight for almost all your life is that everyone watching will begin to think they have an idea of who you are — and who you should be.

Dove Cameron knows this well.

She was only 16 years old when she started filming for Disney Channel's original series, Liv and Maddie, playing the dual lead role of Liv and Maddie Rooney. The show would go on for four seasons, and in between then, Cameron would also take up the role of Mal, daughter of Maleficent and Hades, in the Disney film franchise series Descendants.

When a blonde actress stars in back-to-back Disney productions and has a selection of charting pop songs, there will be certain expectations from the public. It’s a tale as old as time.

Cameron, who has been working for more than half her life, has her own qualms about it. “The person that I started out as in the industry was a child,” she shares. “I didn't know who I was and I sort of let a lot of people tell me who I was or what I should be.”

She didn’t realise how unhappy she was until one day she just hit a wall. “I was just kind of happy putting on my little Dove Cameron costume every day and doing the things that everybody expected of me,” she says. “It made people happy and I didn't know anything different. It was what I thought was authentic until I realised that there could be more and that I could become something more authentic and that I could survive it.”

If the phrase “surviving it” reads like this was a traumatic arc in her formative years, it’s because it was. And how could it not be? When onlookers put you on a pedestal, the expectations don’t work to open up room for you to explore, they start to form a box that keeps you in.