Dove Cameron’s Go London Interview

Dove Cameron may be the
Most famous American actress
That London theatregoers have never heard of

A star of Disney Channel from the age of 16
She won an Emmy playing the dual lead
Roles in teen sitcom Liv and
Maddie and stars as Maleficent’s daughter in
TV movie series The Descendants
She has 25 million Instagram followers
And she’s also a pop singer with a natural
Coloratura soprano range
Now, at 23, and after an off-Broadway run as
Cher in the musical adaptation of Clueless
She’ll be making her London
Debut in The Light
In the Piazza at the Royal Festival Hall

Cameron is tiny, with symmetrical features
But she swears like a trooper and I
Will come to learn that her
On-brand Disney sweetness has been won at
The expense of personal tragedy

She describes The Light in the Piazza
Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s
2003 show as "a true cross-breed
Of opera and musical theatre"
With a score sung in both
English and Italian it
Tells the tale of a rich American woman
(played in Daniel Evans’s new
Production by soprano Renée
Fleming) who travels to Florence in 1953
Where her daughter Clara falls
For a young local

Although Clara is "childlike in
Lots of ways"
This is Cameron’s first adult role
"It’s nice to be 23
And still be able to play
High-school age but in
My next roles I’ll be playing 23
Or 24, " she says, "and my dream
Is to do a role like Monster
Or Black Swan, something
Ridiculous, horrible, damaging"

Cameron was charmingly open about
These problems as she
Has been about bouts of insecurity and
Anxiety through-out her life to
Her millions of
Followers, who are "mostly 17 to 24
Though I know I have a lot of young fans
On Instagram" aware of
Her possible influence, she
Tries to be as honest as possible
And her undeniable ambition and
Glossy self-promotion are tempered
By introspection and self-analysis no wonder
"I started in therapy when I was about eight
After my best friend was murdered
By her own father"
Cameron was born Chloe Celeste Hosterman
The younger daughter of parents
Who ran a jewellery company
On tiny Bainbridge Island
Near Seattle theatre was a central
Part of community life: she could sing
Songs from Rent at three, decided
She wanted to act at seven
And after her parents divorced
Persuaded her mother to move to LA
When she was 14 because
Film and TV offered more roles
For tweens than theatre
A year later her father killed
Himself dove her father’s nickname
For her and her family suspect
He was secretly gay

Thus began an extraordinary double
Life on the outside she looked like a "very
Optimistic, bubbly person" but inside "I was
A mess, miserable, crying every night, not
Eating, so anorexic because all I wanted was
Approval i was just so sad
Truly sad" At 15, she got into
A "horrendous relationship", her first
With a man she describes
As suffocating and controlling
And then she became very famous very quickly

A Disney scout had spotted her singing in a
Choir and when she was 16 put her
In the show that became Liv and Maddie
The pilot was watched by 58 million
And spin-off singles propelled her into
The Billboard Kid Digital
Songs Chart in 2015 the
First Descendants movie
Was seen by 66 million people
And spawned Billboard 100 hit's and
Two sequels cameron’s social
Media following grew and grew
It sounds like a
Recipe for child-star burnout
But she credit's work and
Disney’s paternalism with getting
Her through the nights when she’d
Lie awake "inconsolable and crying
Guttural heaving for hours and hours"

From 2013 she dated Liv and
Maddie co-star Ryan McCarten, and
Formed pop duo The Girl and
The Dreamcatcher with him, but they split
Shortly after getting engaged in 2016 she
And Doherty were friends on
Set before they became romantically involved
In December that year
But their relationship coincided with
A breakthrough in her
Therapy the couple have just bought a
House in LA and she
Calls him her soulmate "He’s the
Rest of my life, for sure i know I sound
Like a 23-year-old in love, I know
I sound like an idiot, but with
My experience of life and death and
Romance and coming and going
It’s just one of those cosmic things
You can’t really say no to"

They got matching tattoos within
Two weeks of getting
Together: he has a version of the
Sun symbol inspired by The Light in the
Piazza on his knee as she says
Maybe it was meant to be