‘Agents of SHIELD’: Dove Cameron Talks Playing a Quake-Obsessed Killing Machine

Disney’s Descendants star Dove Cameron made her Marvel Cinematic Universe debut as Ruby in last night’s episode of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, “All the Comforts of Home.” It turns out Ruby is quite the departure for the Disney actress.

Going into the episode, Agents of SHIELD fans know that Cameron’s Ruby was the daughter of General Hale of the Blue Raven base and that she was very interested in Daisy “Quake” Johnson. What they didn’t know what that Ruby was a trained assassin, described by Cameron as a “killing machine,” and a member of what looks to be the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first proper supervillain team. Cameron tells TVLine that she was not deliberately seeking out a role that would change up her image when she went out for Ruby.

“You know, no, I wasn’t,” she says. “I’ve never thought of myself as someone with an image and therefore I’ve never tried to change any perceived image that I have. I’ve just allllways wanted to do Marvel. Since the dawn of time, Marvel has been my favorite thing. Anything action-related, anything superhero, supervillain, has been a great interest to me since I was very small. I mean, I didn’t know anything going into this audition about who Ruby was going to be; it was very limited information, very limited sides. But it turned out to be something so incredible and exactly what I wanted to do in terms of acting. Because everything I do is not for any kind of image, it’s because I really want to do the roles.”

Cameron didn’t want to reveal too much about her enigmatic character, but she did confirm that Ruby is General Hale’s biological daughter. As for Ruby’s fixation on Quake, fans will have to wait and see, but not for too long.

“I don’t know if I can say yet,” Cameron says. “She’s definitely got an obsession with Quake; I don’t know if that’s out of adoration, if it’s something else. I think she doesn’t know what she would even really do if she saw Quake. It’s been a long time coming and she’s been very fixated on her…. What Ruby thinks is going to happen when she sees Quake might not be exactly what happens when she sees Quake.

“Pretty immediately. In the coming weeks, you will definitely understand how Ruby feels about Quake.”

Ruby was dramatically revealed to be the masked assassin leading robotic Blue Raven soldiers on a mission to capture SHIELD. Cameron confirmed that it was indeed her under the mask during the fight scene. With one throw, Ruby became vital to the history of Agents of SHIELD, using her chakram to slice off Yo-Yo’s arms at the elbow just like had been done to Yo-Yo in the future, where she was forced to be Kasius’s “seer,” and as was done to the character in the Marvel Comics universe.

“You know, Marvel Agents of SHIELD is a very technical show, and they are great about fitting a lot of stunts into a very small amount of time,” she says. “So it wasn’t really like a big, emotional day on set, as much as it was a very technical day on set. Also, I can’t really see anything through that mask, I’m not lying. I can’t see or really hear anything, but that was really me in the background there whole time, for, like, a 12-hour day. But Natalia [Cordova-Buckley] had her own emotional journey, for sure. She had these “green screen arms” on, these little green sleeves…. [Laughs] It ends up looking so devastating and incredible in post[-production]. but it’s very, very technical in person. The show is so incredible to me, how they can do that.”

Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD airs Fridays at 9 p.m. ET on ABC.