Dove Cameron Loves Playing a Dark Character on 'Agents of SHIELD'

At first glance, you might think Dove Cameron would be perfectly suited for the sweet girl next door — but you’d be really, really wrong.

The 22-year-old actress spoke with EW after her debut in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and opened up about why Ruby, the mysterious, edgy assassin is the role she was always meant to play.

“Truly, I was always leaning toward dark stuff. I used to get people turning me down for roles all the time and the No. 1 thing would be, ‘She’s too edgy, she’s making us uncomfortable.’ So this kind of role has been something that I’ve always wanted to play and felt I should be playing,” Dove says.

In fact, she almost didn’t get the parts of Liv or Maddie on Disney Channel because of her edginess.

“Always, since I was 15 and signed on to work for the Disney Channel, it was a huge surprise to me that they even wanted me at all,” she adds. “When I first auditioned for Disney Channel a whole bunch of times, they didn’t want me.”

“They were like, ‘She’s not funny, she’s really intense, she’s coming off something edgy, she’s kind of strange,’ and then it ended up working with the twin show, because I got to do so many things on that show and I got to be two very dramatic characters. Then I learned about comedy and became funny.”

As for Dove‘s character of Ruby, it came at just the right time: “It’s the right time to be doing a character like this, and you’ll see what I mean as time goes on, but it’s really just because I’m having so much fun with it, and not because it’s something I should be doing. This is the character I’ve always wanted to play.”