The problem with being Keke Palmer, Keke Palmer tells me, is that people tend to want you at your most Keke Palmer. “I think there’s an assumption that I’ll definitely say one of my catchphrases,” the actor, mogul and queen of all things online explains, somewhat pensively. “People find me funny even when I’m not trying to be funny, which I guess is a good thing? But I sometimes push up against it. I don’t want to be that annoying person who’s entertaining at all costs, jumping out…” She sighs. “Saying my catchphrases.”
Today, at least, she’s not doing that at all. Speaking from her Los Angeles home, Palmer doesn’t once say the line. Or the other one. Or, really, any of the silky, sassy, sitcomy turns of phrase that long ago transformed Palmer from a conventionally famous actor – so mesmeric in films such as Hustlers and Jordan Peele’s Nope – into the closest person Hollywood has to a living internet meme. “I hate to say it, I hope I don’t sound ridiculous… I don’t know who this man is,” she said during a Vanity Fair “lie detector test” video in 2019, after being asked to – for far too convoluted reasons to succinctly explain here – identify the former US vice-president Dick Cheney from a picture. “He could be walking down the street... I wouldn’t know a thing. Sorry to this man.”
Those 10 seconds of confusion – watched 1.9 million times on YouTube, then millions of times more once it was disseminated, remixed and reappropriated across social media – made Palmer an internet superstar. It was arguably the rich inflections in her voice that did it, the confused stress placed on “this man is”, the wise, comic indifference to her “wouldn’t know a thing”. Other lines of hers – always delivered with an unpredictable, sing-song zhuzh – joined this digital pantheon soon after. “But the gag is…!” “Now who the hell are they?”; “Baby, this is Keke Palmer…”; “It was dripping on my face.” It is impossible to articulate the odd comic rhythms of the internet in text form and the reasons why they take off the way they do – which is why I likely sound insane to have tried. But just know: those rhythms sound like Keke Palmer.
Over Zoom, I’m only getting a portion of the full effect. Palmer’s camera is off. But the 31-year-old, in the midst of promoting her new race-against-time comedy One of Them Days, is such an active user of Instagram that in a few clicks I can see what she looks like right now (she’s currently sporting a red, shoulder-length bob), what she was filming this morning (a TV reboot of the Tom Hanks vehicle The ‘Burbs) and how she spent her afternoon (at a party for her son Leo’s second birthday). “I don’t have a lot of days off,” she says, without a hint of self-pity. “Sometimes I’ll get a few if I’m lucky.” She calls herself a “typical homebody Virgo”, who’s just started watching Gilmore Girls for the first time, and admits to being exhausted. She only has herself to blame, though. “I have so many different things I’m trying to get done that sometimes they end up piling all over each other.”
This has long been the Keke Palmer way. Keke Palmer being, that is, more of a business to be flexed and worked at than a flesh-and-blood human being. “I see Keke Palmer as a brand,” she explains. “She is my art, you know? The way I think about it, she’s an extension of myself. Like I am Keke Palmer, but Keke Palmer is also all the best aspects of Lauren.” (Lauren is Palmer’s birth name, “Keke” the family nickname that stuck when she was little.) “Keke Palmer is the externalised idea of all that I find to be beautiful, fun, interesting and heartfelt. And I express my artistry through her.”
I could never have the confidence to do nudity in a movie. I’m not that bold
Palmer rattles through this fast and thoughtfully. Sans catchphrases. It’s a bit of a reminder of the bifurcation of Palmer’s fame, and her entire persona. On screen, as Daniel Kaluuya’s feisty sister in Jordan Peele’s Nope or one of Jennifer Lopez’s stripper pals in Hustlers, Palmer bears the kind of charisma that could power a jumbo jet. Many people have seen those films. But many more people have presumably only seen Palmer in 30-second bites on TikTok. After we talk, I am asked repeatedly by friends and colleagues whether she was funny during our interview. And she is, naturally and winningly. I leave charmed. But she’s also more sedate than I envisaged, more complex and business-minded. “I am creative and funny but also analytical and serious,” she tells me. “I think very deeply about many things.”
If she didn’t, life may not have ended up so well. Palmer has been working since the age of nine, in a job more or less akin to playing with matches: child acting. She started performing in church in her native Illinois, before finding an agent and building a résumé of parts in films and on television. Her biggest supporters were her parents, actors themselves who put their careers aside to raise their children, who scraped together whatever money they had to help her become a star. She credits them with keeping her on the straight and narrow. “My parents raised me to maintain a connection to reality,” she says. “We were all sacrificing something for what we felt the Keke Palmer brand could be. When we were riding to California, we were riding off a dream.” Keke Palmer, she says, was more or less invented on that car journey. “And we all created her, you know? We all honed in on what that energy was that I had, and we wrote the dream together.”
Her breakthrough role came at the age of 12, playing a spelling prodigy in 2006’s Akeelah and the Bee alongside Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett (her note-perfect impersonation of Bassett has, inevitably, gone viral in recent years). In 2008, Nickelodeon came calling, Palmer spending three seasons as the star of True Jackson, VP, a wish-fulfilment sitcom about a 15-year-old fashion mogul. Fame was sudden and destabilising, something she has mixed feelings about today.
“Obviously I had a good time performing, and I feel happy that I had the joy of doing something that I really, really loved to do,” she says. “But it doesn’t fall deaf on me that I was supporting my family financially. I was a child entertainer making more money than my mom and dad. It was definitely crazy.”
Nickelodeon has come under scrutiny in recent years for allegations of a toxic work environment at a handful of their children’s sitcoms. True Jackson, VP has not been among them, but Palmer does remember her time at the network being occasionally difficult. “It was very, very stressful,” she says. “I had to deal with a lot of opinions and thoughts and adult [responsibilities] that no kid really wants to deal with. But because I’m happy with my life now, I can’t really sit here and regret any of it or harbour any resentment towards it because I’m out the other side.”
That said, she feels a responsibility to care for young actors who may not have the familial support system that she has. “It’s hard to be a child performer, to get out there and do the banana dance over and over and over again,” she says. “It can be joyful while it can also be dehumanising, and I work really hard to be transparent about that with the next generation.”
Palmer speaks often like this, empathetically and with thoughts of public service on her mind. “I feel like America’s little sister, little cousin,” she once said. “I feel very much so related to everybody.” She sometimes comes across like Maya Angelou, if Maya Angelou had starred in a multi-camera sitcom – sensitive, wise beyond her years, prone to silly voices. In the wake of True Jackson, and at the age of 20, Palmer hosted a daytime talk show in which she dispensed advice to young girls. At 24, she published a bestselling self-help book cum autobiography titled I Don’t Belong to You: Quiet the Noise and Find Your Voice, which was followed up last year by another: Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative. Many of the most interesting moments on her popular podcast Baby, This Is Keke Palmer don’t involve her celebrity guests, but occur during the opening half hours of each episode, where it’s just her and, typically, her mother Sharon, riffing existentially about life.
It’s all part of the Keke Palmer machine, but I admit to having missed her acting of late. One of Them Days, in cinemas on Friday, is her first big-screen movie since Nope in 2022. She and singer-songwriter SZA play cash-strapped roommates dashing around LA, attempting to make enough money to pay the rent on their apartment. Palmer is sensational in it – funny and charismatic, her lines delivered with screwball fizz. The film, too, understands her appeal: that scrappy earnestness that’s always made her so endearing, mixed with the slightly vaudevillian absurdity of its presentation. Volume is high, her face elastic. Not since Jim Carrey has an American comedy star been quite so good at distorting their features until they get a laugh.
“I’ve always said I wanted to do a buddy comedy, but one with weight underneath it,” she says. “It’s about friendship, community, and these young women overcoming systemic challenges.” It’s true – the film is innately aware of inequality, gentrification and the day-to-day grind of many Americans’ lives in a way that feels oddly unique in the Hollywood film landscape right now. (Just to add, though, SZA’s character is dating a man with a comically oversized penis and Palmer ends one scene drenched in the contents of an exploding blood packet – in case I’ve made One of Them Days seem far more serious than it is.) The film has also been a hit, something that warms Palmer’s heart. “It’s significant that the movie has made its budget back, and that people enjoyed it and loved it, because that’s going to allow more things like this to be made,” she says. “And it’s significant that we now have proof that people want to see films like this.”
She has, she adds, so much more work she wants to do – even if she does draw the line at certain things. “I’ve always been reluctant to do nudity just because I’m so shy and, you know, embarrassed,” she explains. “And to know that people are going to be able to have [those scenes] forever?” She audibly shudders. But wait, Keke Palmer gets embarrassed? “I could never have the confidence to do something like that!” she squeals. “I’m not that bold.”
Shy? Embarrassed? Not that bold? I hope I don’t sound ridiculous, but I don’t know who this woman is. But, as she reminds me, it’s partly by design. “On a deep level, I think I’ve always been the kind of person that’s felt very lonely or had these big emotions,” she explains. “And I always say that people who are considered comedians, or people that make people laugh, they’re not necessarily seen as serious. Usually, though, they’re the ones with the deepest feelings of all, and it’s that humour that’s helping them get through.”
She thinks back to one of her earliest film roles, a made-for-TV movie called The Wool Cap, and a piece of advice given to her by her co-star William H Macy. “He said, ‘You don’t need to think about the whole movie – you’ve got to take it just one scene at a time’,” she recalls. And, yes, Macy was talking about filmmaking, but she thinks it applies to life, too. “When I’m overwhelmed or worried about what I’m going to do, I just focus on what’s in front of me, do it to the best of my ability, and then move on from there.”
Because, when you think about it, what else is she going to do to cheer herself up? Watch a funny Keke Palmer clip? God knows, there are plenty going around.
‘One of Them Days’ is in cinemas from 7 March
