Dove Cameron on the Story Behind Her Politically-Charged “Breakfast” Video

At the beginning of Dove Cameron’s new music video for “Breakfast,” the second single from her upcoming debut album, the 26-year-old actor and musician is getting ready for work. She pulls up the collar of her crisp white shirt, loops on her tie, and slips into an ‘80s power blazer before settling down to read the newspaper over her morning coffee. Her husband arrives with a cooked breakfast, which she knocks out of his hands, before looking down at him on the floor with a withering stare. “So you wanna talk about power?” Cameron sings in a purposefully sickly sweet cadence. “Let me show you power.”

At this, electric guitars erupt, and the video’s playfully warped take on traditional gender roles becomes clear. For while Cameron is perhaps best known for her work as a Disney star, in the likes of Liv and Maddie and the hit Descendants film series—and more recently, for roles in the Apple TV+ musical series Schmigadoon! and B.J. Novak’s comedy thriller Vengeance—over the past few years, she has stepped out of her shell, revealing a side of herself that is more complex, frank, and politically engaged.

The shift began after Cameron came out as queer in 2020, but it reached its truest expression yet with the release of her single “Boyfriend” earlier this year, a viral hit on TikTok for its thunderous bassline and razor-sharp lyrics about hoping to poach a girl from her boyfriend. “I wrote ‘Breakfast’ around the same time I wrote ‘Boyfriend,’ at a time when I was feeling incredibly disempowered as a young woman,” Cameron says. “I was just expressing my feelings of being discounted or cajoled or underestimated, and thinking, What the fuck is this power dynamic between men and women that constantly leaves women getting the shitty end of the stick?”

Earlier this summer, Cameron had an entirely different video for “Breakfast” in the can when the news about the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade broke. Like so many others, she felt hopeless and frustrated at first, but after talking to other women in her community (and feeling encouraged by her fans’ interpretation of the song as an ode to female autonomy, with its deliciously ruthless lyric, “I eat boys like you for breakfast, one by one hung on my necklace”) she felt galvanized to reinvent the video as a statement about the oppressive impact of traditional gender roles on young women today.