How Disney star Dove Cameron became 'the bad girl next door'
"I've gone from the girl next door to the bad girl next door."
With a laugh — and an almost audible eye-roll — that's how Dove Cameron describes the journey she's been on with "Boyfriend," the sly, smoky electro-pop single that's made her one of 2022's breakout music acts after nearly a decade of acting work in the Disney Channel trenches. In the song, which has been streamed more than 250 million times on Spotify and YouTube, the 26-year-old enumerates some of the many ways she could improve upon a woman's boyfriend, not least her greater stamina and the fact that the women could share a wardrobe.
"The universe must have divined this," she sings over a snarling spy-movie groove, "Ladies first, baby, I insist."
"Boyfriend" presents a darker vision than Disney's smiley "Liv and Maddie" series, in which Cameron played a pair of identical twins, and its "Descendants" series, in," Cameron's brand new follow-up single about how she could eat a guy like you for — well, you get it. And part of that is growing up, of course. Yet Cameron says that, even at its most playful, her music also bears the weight of an inordinately traumatic upbringing that included the murder of her best friend by the friend's father (when Cameron was 8) and her own father's death by suicide (when she was 15). She called recently from Vancouver, Canada, during a break from shooting Season 2 of the Apple TV+ series "Schmigadoon!" to talk about it.
