Dove Cameron Recalls Her First-Ever Gig Performing with Ryan Gosling’s Halloween Band: ‘I Still Listen to It’

Believe it or not, Dove Cameron once performed music with Ryan Gosling.

In a new interview on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, the “Too Much” musician recalled her first-ever paid gig performing alongside Gosling and Zach Shields in their gothic duo Dead Man’s Bones during her childhood.

“Funny enough, the first gig I got was for Ryan Gosling’s Halloween band,” said Cameron, 29. “And it is f—ing incredible. He can do f—ing everything.”

“He had this crazy Halloween band called Dead Man’s Bones,” she added of Gosling and Shields’ now-defunct musical project, which resulted in the release of one self-titled album in 2009 featuring creepy tracks like “Lose Your Soul” and “In the Room Where You Sleep.”

“And it’s really quite good. I still listen to it. It’s very experimental,” said Cameron, noting she joined the group as part of a “ghostly children’s choir” for one performance while growing up on Bainbridge Island in Washington.

While she’d already acted in some local theater productions at the time, the Dead Man’s Bones show marked her first real gig. “I got paid, like, $120 or something,” she joked.

The show took place at “an adults-only underground club” during the band’s tour, for which Gosling and Shields “were casting locally” for young singers like Cameron. “That was my first-ever thing,” she said.

Following the Dead Man’s Bones gig, the “Boyfriend” singer’s career really took off after she landed the lead role in Disney Channel’s Liv and Maddie, for which she won an Emmy Award. Since then, she’s starred in the Descendants franchise as well as Apple TV+’s Schmigadoon!, among other projects — including her hit music career.

“My parents wanted absolutely nothing less for me than to be in film and television,” said Cameron of her mom Bonnie and late father Philip. “I think it was something that they felt was kind of inevitable, and that was my sales pitch.”

“I was like, ‘I’m gonna do this when I turn 18 with or without you. I would really love your support, and I would love to start before it gets much harder for me to start when all the other girls are 18,'” she explained.