DOVE CAMERON has literally just spontaneously burst into song. We’re sitting in the Guggenheim Museum cafe overlooking Central Park, chatting about viral TikTok tracks, and she’s trying to remember the name of that Billie Eilish number from the Barbie movie. “I used to float…” Dove sings, in a voice that immediately cuts through the noise around us. She does it without any self-consciousness, like the way other people sing while they’re doing their dishes or in the shower. In our case, three heads immediately turn in our direction. If they hadn’t realized they were in the same room as An Extremely Talented Famous Person, they know now.
Her fans have, of course, known all along. They’ve been with the 28-year-old since the beginning—or since 2013, when she was 17, if we’re being literal—when she starred as the titular twins in the Disney Channel series Liv and Maddie. Then those fans multiplied when she played Mal in the hugely popular Descendants franchise, also on Disney. She had children across the country in a chokehold (if you need proof of this, two high school girls spotted Dove on our way out of the museum and literally squealed with delight) even if their parents couldn’t pick her out of a lineup. But then she showed off a powerhouse voice in Hairspray Live! and a new category of stans joined in. Appearing alongside Jennifer Aniston in Netflix’s Dumplin’ in 2018 didn’t hurt either; neither did her role in Apple TV+’s musical comedy Schmigadoon! And then there was the music, which served as a soundtrack to every Descendants movie and helped her rake in Spotify listeners before she had a chance to create her own sound.
But around the time she turned 24, some of that work started to feel at odds with the person she was becoming. She did the classic “I’m an adult now—get on board or get lost” thing that most former Disney kids are forced to do: She broke up with a long-term boyfriend, came out as queer, dyed her hair dark brunette, added to the tattoo collection she started when she was 14, released a song that went viral in part because she talks about yearning for another woman, and spent a lot of time processing trauma—including the death of her father when she was 15—that she’d been living with but hadn’t gotten the chance to really get through. It was a complete overhaul.
And the result of all that internal stuff is, unsurprisingly, a personal and professional life that looks completely different from everything up until now. She’s playing the lead in Obsession, an upcoming super-dark thriller series from Amazon Prime Video. And her debut album, Alchemical: Volume 1, released in December, serves as a purging of the past. The self-written lyrics flip-flop between fuck-you aggression and relatable desperation: “I eat boys like you for breakfast” and “What’s worse? Being wanted but not loved or loved but not wanted?” But Volume 2, due out soon, is the topic of conversation as we stroll through the galleries—that and the enthrallingly electric phase she finds herself in now. It’s not just the result of the self-described emotional “bloodletting,” although that’s a big part of it. It’s her newish Met Gala red-carpet-worthy relationship with Måneskin lead singer and certified Italian Hot Man Damiano David. It’s the attention she’s paid to her mental health. It’s the choice to leave a certain version of herself behind.
We’re currently hanging out in a place that’s a shrine to artistic expression, so forgive me for this very basic question that I’m using to tie us to our setting, but did you always know you wanted to pursue a career in the arts?
When you’re a child, you’re not thinking, I have to choose a career path. You’re like, I like movies, I like music, and I like clothes. My first big purchase was the entry-level Brother sewing machine that looks like a Simpsons cartoon. I used to take my dad’s work T-shirts and I would turn them into dresses and skirts that used his neck hole for my waist hole. I was 8.
My sister and I grew up with an emphasis on any sort of artistic expression, like the theater, movies. My dad was also a pianist, so it was jazz music, classical music. My mom started us in the local theater when we were quite young. So I felt very lucky because it was never like, “That’s an unrealistic profession.” My parents couldn’t care less what I did.
They were never like, “You have to be an accountant.”
No. If I told my mom I wanted to be an archaeologist, if I told my mom I wanted to sit by the river and paint pictures all day, they’d be supportive if I was happy. It was a huge gift they gave me.
It’s ironic that you ended up on the Disney Channel anyway, because it’s such a mainstream culture machine that kids like me watched instead of listening to their father play jazz music on a piano.
I think about that all the time. By the time I was living in L.A. and auditioning for things, there were just so few roles for kids that age. So I ended up going out for a couple of Disney pilots before one of the casting directors called my agent, and was like, “First of all, she’s not funny. Second of all, she’s got this kind of dark edge that is really off-putting and it’s never going to work for Disney.”
So you had to decide if you wanted to make yourself into what they wanted you to be.
It’s not that I was crazy edgy or anything, but I didn’t really fit. And now, I think there’s a very strong idea of who I am, and I feel very passive in terms of being an editor of that. But I didn’t understand when I was a kid that there was no revisiting your first introduction to the public. And I had no idea who I was or what I was doing. And so I didn’t realize how strongly they felt about who they thought I was until I stepped back and I was like, “I don’t even know where to begin to rectify this because it was so far off.”
Your recent music is such a huge reclamation of your image. It comes through in the lyrics, the sound. It’s both a rebellion and a reintroduction. You’ve spoken in other interviews about how working on Alchemical: Volume 1 was very much a processing of trauma and how the second portion was going to feel very different. What’s coming through for you in Volume 2?
When I was writing part one, I was doing it structurally really differently. I would sit down for maybe a week at a time or four days here and there and try to write as many songs as possible. And then a few weeks would go by and I’d go back in. I was feeling a lot, but I hadn’t gotten to the other side of what I was feeling to the point where I could write about it with perspective. It just kind of felt like a swirling current experience. When I started writing Volume 2, I really thought I was only going to write four or five more songs. And then I started doing this exercise. The very first week of January, I started going in Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, sometimes two sessions a day, sometimes trying to write three songs a day and just see what comes of it.
And the music that was coming out of it was sonically very different. I felt like a completely different artist. The messaging, the energy, the vocals, the identity, everything just sort of transformed. And my label basically was like, “Okay, we don’t want to interrupt this. Don’t travel, don’t go anywhere.” It was a desk job, a 9-to-5, you clock in no matter what, and sometimes you’re like, “Wow, I really fucking hated that song and no one’s ever going to hear it, and that’s totally fine because I’m back in tomorrow.”
It always feels so douchey to talk about a sound, this stupid ephemeral thing you can’t nail, but it’s definitely very celebratory. I think I gave up a lot of the idea of who I thought I had to be and now I’ve started having a lot of fun making my music.
What allowed you to do that?
All the mental health work I was doing on myself. It was like, do I want to be having fun in my 20s? Or do I want to feel constantly afraid of myself, afraid of messing up, paralyzed by fear, like I don’t even move? Or do I want to look back and be like, “Oh, I really fucked around and found out”? That was part of it. But also, I fell in love. Suddenly, you have a totally new chapter that you’re writing about that just didn’t exist a few months ago.
Is this the point in the interview where we get to talk about the boyfriend1? Because I’m dying to get into it. How did you meet?
The first time was at the 2022 VMAs and his band and I were both up for the same award.2 You just run into different artists backstage, and when I met them, I don’t think I even spoke to Damiano. I didn’t think anything of it. I went about my night. I’d just won a VMA. And then a couple months later, their team had reached out to me about coming to their album release and I couldn’t make it work with the dates, but I was like, “Oh, that’s so sweet that they thought about me. We only met once.” At one point, the band and I had been thinking about doing a collaboration. They had recorded something, so I went in and I recorded over that track. They’d asked me to open for them on their tour and I couldn’t make it happen. There were just these passing-ships-in-the-night things happening. So when we met again at the 2023 VMAs, we had a reason to talk to each other.
And when he came up to me, it felt like…I don’t know, a year can do a lot. It felt like it had been 10 years or something. When we had met before, he was in a very different space and I was too, so we didn’t register each other at all in that way. And then he was like, “We’re starting our world tour at Madison Square Garden. If you’re still in town in a few days, we’d love it if you came.” It was super innocent. And then they invited me back to their greenroom and then we started talking and then he asked me to the after-party. And then very quickly it became “Let’s have dinner at 8:00 at this spot.” He’s a Capricorn, so he was very much like, “Okay, these are my intentions.” It was super honorable. He’s like a 1950s gentleman, angel, teddy bear. He’s the best person I’ve met in my life.
1. Two days before Dove and I chatted, she and Damiano had walked the Met Gala red carpet together. Rumors of her relationship with the 25-year-old singer started back in September 2023, and they attended their first public events together during Grammys weekend in February 2024. They are, unsurprisingly, very cute together.
2. For the record, Dove won, and it was for Best New Artist. But I’m sure they have no sense of competition about it now!
How quickly did things move after that night in the greenroom?
From the outside, it looks like it was very hot and heavy, and it looks like it was overnight, but we had both been in situations where we were very harmed in the past and we are very sensitive people. And I think when we met, we were not looking, and it was just sort of investigating. It was like, “Huh, that’s interesting. That’s not what I expected.” And so it was very, very slow, cautious, feeling-out, interview-type questions for eight hours before it was finally like, “Okay, are we holding hands now?” I remember I was fascinated because he presents in a way that seems very easily digestible and then you spend two minutes around him and you realize he is the kindest, most generous, most innocent, most giving person. He’s just a beautiful, sensitive soul.
I love when people surprise you. But like you said, you had both experienced some harm in past relationships. What did you learn from those instances that you were able to take into this?
Red flags in the beginning are red flags forever. They don’t go away. I’ve been in so many relationships where my actual standing in the relationship or even my physical safety was threatened because I acted in a way that was not in their expectations of me, and the expectations would be so fucking thin. I wish I had spoken about what was going on in those relationships to my community, who would’ve pulled me out. If a boyfriend’s ever telling you, “Don’t tell anyone what goes on between us,” call your mom right now. Call your fucking mom.
If it feels wrong, it’s wrong. And when it feels safe and you feel calm…and your partner is your friend first…then it’s right, for the most part.
I had a friend who told me once, “I’ll know that I’m in the right relationship when it’s exciting.” And I remember thinking, I’ll know that I’m in the right relationship when I feel safe. Once you can fully be yourself and you know your partner accepts you completely, that is so liberating. It’s freedom.
The funny thing, too, is that our brains tell us the exciting thing is first, and then it gets safe, and then it gets boring and it’s like this sugar crash. I actually think that the safety that you build together allows for the solid ground, and then it’s all exciting.
Exactly. That’s where the good stuff is. What do you think it is about Damiano that helped you find that?
I’ve been spending time with him and all of his friends and his brother, and they are incredibly sensitive, incredibly romantic, incredibly emotional, very caretaking, equal parts masculine, feminine, equal parts nurturing and protecting. And I wouldn’t say that American men aren’t, but that’s just something I’ve overwhelmingly noticed in Italy. There’s a certain balance between masculine and feminine that is very attractive to me as someone who dates men and women. It feels whole to me.
And I’m sure that helps you honor your own queerness in your relationship.
Totally, oh my god. What’s beautiful, too, is that when we met, my coming out was happening. So how he knew me was through the lens of my queer identity. And as my partner, he is very, very supportive. I’ve never felt invalidated by dating him as a straight man. I’ve always felt like he saw me as my full self and for my identity, while also not feeling threatened or diminished by that.
It’s been a few years since you came out, and this is the first relationship you’ve been in publicly since then. How do you deal with people’s expectations of what your relationship can or should look like? Who your partner “should” be?3
A year and a half ago, it would’ve completely made me spiral to have people question my identity. But I try to allow for as much empathy and understanding for people who do not know what they don’t know, which is not to say there isn’t room to grow. That’s why I have empathy, because I believe that we can get there. I believe that the conversation is only going to be furthered by humanizing everyone. The conversation about not understanding how I can be bisexual and have a straight boyfriend, I have more patience for it. People are scared of what they don’t understand, and so they try to put a label on something and they make it smaller so that they feel like they can hold it and see it and touch it and smell it.
3. Dove has also dealt with past accusations of queerbaiting in her music, to which she responds: “It would be such a wild, wild backflip to change the course of your whole life for a radio hit.”
And being in a public relationship, in some ways, invites all these unsolicited opinions. What did the conversations around “going public” in your relationship look like? As a regular person who has never had to think about that, I’m always curious.
We’re also regular people. At one point, some paparazzi photos got leaked. We went back to the hotel room and we were like, “Well. Fuck, I guess.” I think in the pap photos we were kissing, and both of us had never been in that situation. There’s no handbook for how to handle this. We were pretty casual at that point. So it was, do we trust that this is going to go right? We didn’t know. So we went about it in the most sane way we could think of, which is just leave it. Live our lives, but live them mostly quietly.
How do you navigate putting all that into the work? I know a lot of artists take issue with fans paternity-testing their lyrics to see who they’re about.
This is my approach: If it is in service to the story, no detail should be left out. If it is about spite or revenge, then that’s ugly, and I wouldn’t go there. That being said, you get into a sticky zone where if it’s vague enough, they might blame the person that you’re dating now. So it’s interesting to try to navigate, because now people are like, timeline, DNA testing, fingerprints….
What’s that Real Housewives of Salt Lake City line? “Receipts, proof, timeline, screenshots!”
Yeah, exactly. Some artists write so much that they can have an album come out every six months, and so it’s easier to keep up with. Obviously, we have our icon, queen of the world Taylor Swift, who is writing in real time all the time. And so it’s very easy for us to sort of be like, “Oh, this was so and so, this was so and so.” As songwriters, you have to use your own judgment. Most of my new album is love songs. It’s going to be very obvious. It’s literally talking about speaking Italian and meeting his mother, and you look like Freddie Mercury. I’m not hiding anything.
“I’m not hiding anything” seems like it could be the title of your memoir right now. What kind of mentality shift got you to this place where, as you said earlier, you’re fucking around to find out?
When I was younger, I wasn’t very realistic. I wanted to bend time and space and my body and my health to my will just to get everything done. Now I’ve returned to this viewpoint where it’s like, maybe I can be unrealistic now. Maybe I can be delusional now. Do we tell ourselves what’s realistic? Do we set those parameters? Are we the ones projecting our own limitations? So I think at some point I started to get in my own head, and now I feel renewed. Things are only impossible until you redefine the possible.
Lead image: Posse cardigan. Anna October bralette. Leset stirrup leggings. Area platforms. Essentiel Antwerp earrings. David Webb rings.
Stylist: Cassie Anderson. Hair: Jacob Rozenberg at The Wall Group using RōZ Hair. Makeup: Kale Teter at The Wall Group. Manicure: Julie Kandalec at Bryan Bantry using Olive & June. Set design: Sarah Caye.
Executive producer: Sarah Lowen. Lead producer: Liesl Lar. Director of photography: Kevin Kim. Assistant camera: James Sullivan. Gaffer: Alessandro Imperiale. Key grip: JD Acha. Production assistant: Joshua Cornejo. Editor: Sarah Ng.
