Dove Cameron is COSMOPOLITAN’s Digital Cover Star!

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Actor and singer Dove Cameron is ready to f*ck around and find out. Her personal and professional life 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 new music is indicative of a whole new vibe: one where she cares a lot less about what other people think and a lot more about her own happiness. To say it’s working for her would be an understatement. Now COSMOPOLITAN’s latest digital cover star, 28-year-old Dove Cameron is “not hiding anything,” opening up about Volume 2 (due out soon), the enthrallingly electric phase she finds herself in now, her newish relationship with Måneskin lead singer Damiano David, the attention she’s paid to her mental health, and more.

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On growing up with an emphasis on artistic expression: “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… 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.”

On being told she wasn’t funny enough for Disney: “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.’”

On realizing she had very little control over her image: “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.’”

On her recent music as a reclamation of your image, both a rebellion and a reintroduction: “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.”

On how the mental health work she did on herself allowed her to have fun making her music: “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 f*cked 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.”

On meeting her boyfriend Damiano David, lead singer of Måneskin: “The first time was at the 2022 VMAs and his band and I were both up for the same award…. 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…. 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.’”

On honoring her queerness in this relationship: “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.”

On writing about her exes in her songs: “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…. 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.”

On what kind of mentality shift got her to this place where, as she said, she is f*cking 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.”

[Photo Credit: Anna Koblish for Cosmopolitan Magazine]

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