Dove Cameron has mastered the art of multitasking — in this case, doing an interview while in the glam chair with a premiere hours away. 

“We’re just every day flying by the seat of our pants. It’s crazy,” Cameron says. “I haven’t done this much press since, I don’t know, Disney days. It’s actually more now — I thought I knew how to do a crazy amount of press, but the amount of press that we’re doing for this show is, it’s really wild.”

The former Disney star, who rose to fame in the series “Liv and Maddie” and later the “Descendants” franchise, is starring in a new thriller series for Prime Video called “56 Days,” opposite Avan Jogia. The 30-year-old actor plays Ciara, who begins an intense relationship with Oliver; their relationship flashes back across its beginning and forward to a police investigation into an unidentified dead body. 

“There’s this feeling that when I read a script, when I really love the character that is like, it’s not work-related. It’s almost as though they’re a real person to me and I feel this sense of responsibility,” Cameron says. “‘I understand you, I want to do you justice.’ I think that she’s a deeply complex character. I’m always drawn to characters that need a little bit of defense.”

Cameron was in New York for the Met Gala two years ago when she first got a “kismet” phone call about the show, from the creator Karyn Usher, whom she had first met some 10 years prior about a different show.

“One of my big early heartbreaks in Hollywood was when I was 14 years old and I was in the running for this Fox show, back when Fox was doing all those really intense network shows way before streaming even, and it was a lead in my own Fox show that was about this little girl who her dad was a spy and then he goes missing,” Cameron recalls. “And it was such a rare project because you never get a lead role in a network show as a kid unless it’s Disney.”

That show ended up going with a different actor, but Usher had sent Cameron flowers following the audition, thanking her for her work. The two hadn’t seen each other at all in the decade that followed, before “56 Days” came along. 

“It’s a show focused around four people that are varying degrees of being led by good intentions and fighting against their own understanding of the world around them and the things that keep them trapped in their own world views and their own end goals and prerogatives,” Cameron says. “People are more complex and more fragile and more affectable than we make them out to be. People are not one-dimensional and it doesn’t make them good or bad. It makes them something in between. I think that presenting complex characters like this and asking the audience to understand and empathize with them is actually a really beautiful psychological exercise into understanding other people around you or not dehumanizing people.”

Cameron has entered into a stage of her career when she feels like she has “finally” entered into a more adult chapter. 

“I think that I’m able to finally play roles that I wanted to play when I was younger because I am more experienced. I’m older now. People don’t see me in a light that was maybe very specific from when I was younger, very carved into the mind of the public because of childhood branding and things like that,” she says. “So I’m really enjoying that kind of level of freedom. It feels like the floodgates are kind of open with what opportunities I have now, which is just something I’ve never had, never had before these last two years.”