Her hit single may be called ‘cool for the summer’, but e very thing else about Demi Lovato’s life is heating up. And the steamiest part of all? Her fiery, super-sizzling sense of self.
It’s 9:26 a.m. on a Saturday, and Demi Lovato and I are singing Fetty Wap’s ‘Trap Queen’, legs hoisted, feet fluttering, sweat dripping. We’re in the mirrored cardio dungeon that is her home gym, located securely outside L.A.’s Thirty Mile Zone (from which TMZ gets its name). For the next hour, her trainer Ronny Comacho will put us through high-intensity interval drills made all the more brutal by the fact that Demi likes her workouts heated—like poach-anegg- in-your-sports-bra heated.
I have always been an extreme person with everything I do,” Demi tells me post-sweat sesh. “My workouts can’t be easy or else I don’t feel like I’m doing anything. If I’m cycling, I’m cycling hard. If I’m hiking, I’m not doing Runyon Canyon.” For the uninitiated: Hollywood’s Runyon Canyon, a hotbed for celebs, is as much a destination for selfies as it is for heart health. “That hike is cute. But if you go to Runyon and come out with your face full of makeup still on, then that wasn’t a workout.”
The competitive streak started early for the Texas girl whose big break was as a regular on Barney And Friends. She was seven years old. “Even when I was in school,” she recalls, “I wasn’t just going to be homeschooled, I was going to graduate at 16.” And she did. But as her fans, the Lovatics, are by now well aware, there can be a darker side to having such a single-minded intensity. Especially as it collides with psychological issues and growing up in the public eye. Now 23, the actress/ singer’s rapid ascent to stardom is marked by struggles with an eating disorder, violence, alcohol, drug abuse and a bipolar disorder diagnosis.
Today, what were once barreling self-destructive forces are being channeled into leg lifts, lunges, sumo squats and bounce squats. So. Many. Squats. The workout is a cathartic and important part of Demi’s current routine, both mentally and physically. But in the past, the “total perfectionist” cited her obsessive personality as a reason to skip the gym. “I used it as an excuse not to work out,” she says, laughing. “Like, ‘I don’t want to get too obsessed with it.’ Everyone around me was like, ‘Demi, you’re lazy—you’re not going to get obsessed.’ But I monitor myself. And I tell everyone—Ronny, Wilmer, my team—to monitor it.”
Wilmer Valderrama, Demi’s live-in boyfriend, keeps an eye on us, so to speak. Displayed in the gym is an illustration of the actor as Bruce Lee in Enter The Dragon that reads “Enter the Fez”—a reference to his role on That ’70s Show. “It’s really crazy,” Demi says of their relationship. “I hate sounding cheesy but the term soulmate? You don’t find that ever. Having somebody who can point out things before I even realise them is really good.” Take, for instance, our photo shoot—Demi’s first in her underwear. “I was psyching myself out for weeks,” she says. Once she was on set, she sent Wilmer a sneak peek. “I was like, ‘Um, babe?’ I didn’t know how else to say this is what’s happening. He was like, ‘Oh my gosh. That looks amazing.’ I felt very sexy.”
The couple, who recently shared screen time on TV show From Dusk Till Dawn, have been “off and on” for five years. The ‘off’, Demi concedes, was mostly of her own doing. “The only times we ever broke up were when I was relapsing, whether it was doing drugs or being in a bad place and rebelling against everybody, not just him,” she says. “People say that relapses happen before you use. Your mind starts setting up the relapse before you take that drink or that first hit. The times we’d broken up, I had already gone to that place of, ‘Yeah, this is what’s happening’. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I just wanted to sabotage everything around me so that I could sabotage myself.” Wilmer wasn’t about to throw in the towel. “We started dating when I turned 18,” she says. “Right after that, I went to rehab. People told him, ‘You should probably leave. She’s on a spiral, and you’re going to be sucked down with it.’ But he was like, ‘I’m not leaving. This is somebody I really care about.’ We relate on a lot of levels. I’ve seen a lot of s***. S*** people don’t know about. He’s seen a lot of stuff too.” Perhaps that’s what makes the 35-yearold good at assessing her needs. “Yesterday, I slept in, and he was like, ‘Are you okay? You slept all day.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I worked so hard. I’m tired.’ But he reminds me, ‘You may be depressed and not realise it.’”
You can’t fault Demi for wanting to get her sleep on. Painted on one of the gym mirrors is the number 17—as in days until the video shoot for her single ‘Cool For The Summer’. She’s gearing up for the release of the instaparty anthem and a summer packed with performances in decidedly hotfor- the-summer bathing suits, so she’s also in the best shape of her life. But not everyone will welcome her new revealing look. A few weeks after we meet, she’ll shut down her haters on Twitter with “Showing more skin cause I’ve worked HARD for this body #SORRYNOTSORRY.” Still, she tells me, “Sometimes I love my body. Sometimes I wake up and I’m like, ‘I’m working so hard. Why isn’t anything changing?’”
For her fifth studio album, Demi is promising tracks with more bite. “There are a lot of girls in pop. They have badass lyrics, but I feel like I’m the only person other than Rihanna and Nicki Minaj who isn’t afraid to go there. There are people who can dress up and play the part, but their music doesn’t say it.” It’s clear that Demi is all toned-armed and ready to battle her peers to the top of the charts. “I wish I could word this in a way that doesn’t sound bitchy, but I don’t mess around. Girls can be catty with one another. But they know I physically don’t put up with it.” Case in point: the 2010 incident in which she hit a backup dancer aboard a South American flight. “I’m not proud of the mistakes I’ve made. At the same time, my past shows what I’m capable of. I’m a wiser person today," she says.
She will, however, go to the mat for the artists on her new label with Nick Jonas. Safehouse Records was created in part as a response to an industry that often ignores the humanity of its artists (see Amy Winehouse and even Demi herself) in favour of the bottom line. “If an artist is struggling with something, they can come to us and say, ‘I’m really overworked. I need some advice,’” she says. “You’re in a safe environment to talk about it. We want it to be like a family.”
Demi, who dated Nick’s older brother Joe, asserts that she and her cofounder have always loved each other on a platonic level. “Even when Joe and I broke up, I would talk to [Nick] about it. Now we’re practically married as business partners.”
Thankfully, Wilmer’s not the jealous type. “Nick and Wilmer get along great—Joe and Wilmer too. It’s weird. In the beginning, I was like, ‘Why are you friends with Joe?’ He was like, ‘He’s a cool guy.’ Yeah, I know. I dated him.”
That was back when the JoBros wore promise rings, Miley wore pants and Demi was a normie—the term of endearment that her friends in recovery use for drinkers. Three-anda- half years sober looks a lot different from her white-knuckle early days. “I used to be very judgmental and stuck up when I had a year-and-a-half sober,” she says. “I recently rekindled friendships with people, because I thought that if you weren’t sober then you didn’t have your s*** together. I thought I was better than you. I’m no longer that judgmental person.” Wilmer is a normie, and for the record, she’s fine with it. “I don’t get triggered like I used to,” she says. “If he wants to have a drink, I’m like, ‘Go for it. Do your thing.’” Not that her outlook was always so breezy. “There was a time when I was jealous of people who were able to party. For instance, Miley—in her music video ‘We Can’t Stop’, her whole thing was partying and not giving a toss. Part of me was super jealous that I couldn’t be like that. I had to look at my life and be like, ‘Okay, that’s just not what you can do. There’s no need to be bitter about it.’”
For Demi, being sober means feeling all the feels and working through them. “When you are sober, you experience everything on a heightened level. If you are going through something stressful, you’re extra stressed. I used to sit through a scary movie and not be scared once. At haunted houses, things would jump out at me, and I would sit there bored. Then I got sober and I feel everything. I cry more. I laugh harder. Everything. You have to think, If you are chasing the next party your whole life and you always have to be numb, is that something to be proud of?”
As a former child star, not being the party girl is, in some ways, Demi’s most extreme act. She’s turned her laser-sharp focus to building an empire. This year, she’ll launch a Kardashian-esque mobile game costarring her Maltipoo Buddy (a Christmas gift from Wilmer) and voice Smurf ette in the upcoming Get Smurfy. She also has her eye on the prize: “I would really like to get a Grammy one day.” Just don’t expect her to fit into anybody else’s mold to get one. “The industry needs the artist who wears rhinestones and high heels and can walk wherever in head-to-toe glam 24/7. The industry also needs those who aren’t going to conform. I’m the second person. I don’t conform. I wear sweats. I don’t put on heels to go to Whole Foods.” We wouldn’t have it any other way.
