“You have to touch this.” I’m sitting outside a coffee shop in Hollywood on a sweltering July afternoon with Disney Channel starlet-on-the-rise Dove Cameron. She is running her manicured fingers across the wall directly to the right of us, which is textured with black lettering. “It’s really nice. I can’t decide if it’s decals or paint,” she muses, before feverishly launching back into what we were just discussing, which is why she feels celebrity doesn’t come naturally to her. “It just promotes this unapproachable pedestal thing, and that’s very lonely and silly. It’s so weird because being a celebrity is no different than having any other job, except we’ve decided as a society that it is. Nobody is higher than anybody else, so what a strange thing to feed into.”

There are three things you notice early on when chatting with the actress/singer, whose mixed feelings about the twisted nature of celebrity haven’t stopped the Disney monolith from launching the twenty-one-year-old to the precipice of fame, after a long-winded stint playing the dual roles of the titular twins on Disney Channel’s Liv and Maddie, and starring as Maleficent’s daughter Mal in Descendants and Descendants 2, which premieres this month to a rabid fandom:

1) She is beautiful, in a warm and exuberant way that invokes a modern day Marilyn Monroe, all wide-set doe eyes, plump lips, and platinum blonde hair.

2) She was (is) a theater kid, radiating energy, talking with her hands, and effortlessly affecting a range of crisp voices and goofy facial expressions when she’s telling a story.

3) She is teeming with an inquisitive thoughtfulness that extends well beyond her years, reserving the same genuine enthusiasm for the paint on a wall of a coffee shop as she does for her relationship (“I’m so in love. It’s criminal. We both just turned our lives upside down, like ‘Oh my god, I had no idea you were out there.’ He’s just the most quality human being. He shouldn’t exist.”) and her advice to her younger self (“It’s like that old adage, ‘Be careful how you see the world, for it is that.’ Don’t let anyone tell you that the world doesn’t revolve around you, because it does.”)

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