‘I am the industry!’: Keke Palmer on being Hollywood’s queen of content

In an era when social media has turned us all into products to promote, Keke Palmer is the whole damn corporation. As a one-woman multimedia, multiplatform conglomerate, the 31-year-old is starring in acclaimed movies (the Oscar-robbed stripper heist film Hustlers; Jordan Peele’s 2022 sci-fi-western-horror hybrid Nope), releasing R&B pop music (including 2020’s Virgo Tendencies, Pt II), hosting gameshows (the Jimmy Fallon-produced Password on NBC), talkshows (Just Keke on BET, plus a stint on Good Morning America) and her own podcast (Baby, This Is Keke Palmer), all the while regularly serving up sassy memes to the hungry internet hordes as casually as McDonald’s serves fries. It’s like Keke Palmer writes in the introduction to Keke Palmer’s new book Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative – in the diva-ish third-person, of course – Keke Palmer can do it all, honey!

This morning, that means being in New York to record some additional dialogue on her new movie and finish the edit on a new TV show she’s producing, then squeezing in some time watching Sesame Street with her 20-month-old son, Leodis, before ducking out to find a quiet spot to continue our video chat about Master of Me – which, she says, isn’t a memoir exactly. “I think my push-up against the word is because it feels so me, me, me,” she says.

She’s holding her cameraphone under her chin as she walks, talks and chews gum, giving a low-angle view of her oversized, square-framed glasses, sleek shoulder-length hair and baseball cap. It’s a lot to juggle, but Palmer does not miss a beat as she expounds on her performance-as-public-service philosophy, in that characteristic, singsong preacher’s cadence. “Although it is about me, it’s about how my stories reflect [the reader’s] stories … I really wanted it to feel quite communal.”

To that end, Master of Me combines the usual stuff of celebrity autobiography – a rundown of career highs and lows, fulsome expressions of gratitude to mentors and the inside track on her personal life (namely the breakup from her son’s father, Darius Jackson, that prompted an Usher diss track in his direction) with a strong sense of Palmer’s reader-empowerment mission. Chapter titles include Affirmations for Keke (and Anyone Else Who Needs to Hear This) and For My Entrepreneur Baddies, while each section is rounded off with a multiple-choice “Self-Assessment Exercise”. “If I’m going to be asking somebody to buy a book, I definitely want it to feel like this is something you’re going to get a lot of use out of, y’know?” she says.

A multitasker, both by vocation and necessity, Palmer derived her book’s title from a longer, less disparaging variation on the adage: “A jack of all trades is master of none,” she quotes now, having found a sofa to settle on, “but oftentimes better than a master of one!” It’s this last bit that resonated: “Now that is the truth! Because if I’m just focusing on one thing, then all my power is going to that, instead of mastering oneself, which is the hardest thing to do, but it makes you capable of more.”

If this sounds solipsistic, note that it also fits her broader analysis of economic history: “That saying was popular during the Industrial Revolution so, of course, they want you to master one particular trade, because that helps the industry. Now we’re moving into a new time where it ain’t about the industry; I’m the industry. I am putting myself in the centre, not giving it all to one corporation.”

It wasn’t always this way. Palmer came up as a child performer, giving her all to two corporations in particular, Disney and Nickelodeon. Today, she describes herself, not without pride, as a graduate of “the Disney School”, an informal but influential establishment that includes Selena Gomez, Ryan Gosling and Zendaya. What did she learn there? “It’s kind of like vaudevillian-ish or MGM-style,” she says, referencing the golden-era Hollywood studio responsible for developing Judy Garland. “They just teach you to be a multifaceted entertainer and to repurpose yourself in every way you can. Because, essentially, that’s what they’re trying to do as a company: get the biggest bang for their buck.”

Palmer was nine when she started working and just 12 when she became the main breadwinner for her family – mum Sharon, dad Larry, older sister Loreal and younger twin siblings Lawrencia and Lawrence. This must have disrupted the dynamic at home? “It definitely did,” says Palmer, who answers every question with endearing sincerity. “It was weird for me.”

They managed to stay close, however, which Palmer attributes to a family culture of flexible collaboration and eschewing traditional gender roles: “Because that’s what life calls us all to do … Y’know, I look today at what the kids are saying online – and by ‘the kids’, I mean the folks, everyone – we have these weird ideas of what it means to be a man or woman, and it’s so stringent. My parents bounced back and forth to play all different roles.”

The weirder thing, on reflection, was how other industry adults, those outside her family, behaved. “Especially as a Black child. It was very like ‘You’re too good to be here … you deserve to be a part of a different family’ type of energy. It’s like, well, this family is mine. It’s OK if they’re from the midwest or they don’t look the way you think they should look. There was this elitism that was projected on my parents, even though they were the ones that raised me to be the person that I am; the person that people think couldn’t be their child.”

The uncomfortable interactions didn’t end there, either. In Master of Me, Palmer details several encounters, on set and off, which range from inappropriate behaviour to what she terms “regular-degular sexual harassment”. Has she since developed an instinct for sorting scurrilous rumour from serious red flag? “Well sometimes it’s the whole thing of ‘that person didn’t do anything to me’,” she says, before growing quieter. “But I’ve learned that don’t really mean anything.”

Ultimately, she says, “if those are principles you stand by, then your actions and who you deal with should align”. That said, she wouldn’t want to be mistaken for an omniscient database of celebrity misdeeds: “I think that is something, too, that we’re sometimes assuming in this day and age: that everybody knows what everybody did! Y’know, sometimes you don’t know! You ain’t reading up, or you’re not paying attention! And it’s fair to say ‘Wait a minute, I didn’t know all the details’ or ‘I’m not sure’.”

Palmer is generally plugged into the discourse, however, because when she aged out of child stardom, it was social media that allowed her to come into her own as an autonomous entrepreneur baddy. “Content creation is a great thing to leverage and to diversify your portfolio,” she says, sounding like one of the Wall Street bros her character defrauds in Hustlers. “I wish I could say I immediately knew it was my way to freedom, but I really was just following the creativity bug.” She began producing skits and sketches on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, which then led to more traditional opportunities, such as making musical theatre history as Broadway’s first Black Cinderella in 2014. Even today, if you’re keeping up with Keke “Keep a Job” Palmer (as she’s been fondly dubbed by fans) on film and TV, you’re seeing only a fraction of her total output.

Meanwhile, she maintains that portfolio diversity by always having multiple projects on the go. In addition to Master of Me, this currently includes co-starring with Glastonbury-headlining musician SZA in an upcoming Issa Rae-produced film; a role alongside Keanu Reeves and Seth Rogan in Aziz Ansari’s feature-directorial debut, Good Fortune, and teasing music video drops for her semi-satirical – but seemingly fully functional – girl group, DivaGurl. “It’s kind of like my version of Spinal Tap,” she says.

It was also social media that allowed Palmer to showcase her calling-card personality; the “Me” that she’s successfully mastered and monetised. This is what persuaded Jordan Peele to cast her in Nope without an audition, and that bonded her with Hustlers co-star and fellow multitasker Jennifer Lopez. “She always had this vibe of ‘I like you’ towards me … Y’know, her ass is really still ‘Jenny from the Block’. She really is real like that.”

The Keke Palmer persona is less “from the Block”, more “from the backstage musical”, due in part to the old-school entertainer ethic instilled in her from childhood. She calls everyone “honey” or “baby”, for instance, regardless of circumstance or seniority. “I noticed as a teenager that people like Whitney Houston, all the really fabulous women, they always said ‘honey’, ‘baby’ to people,” she explains. This pairs well with her range of homespun catchphrases, such as “Sorry to this man” (resulting from her much-memed failure to identify former US vice-president Dick Cheney) and “The gag is … ”, which is usually accompanied by some vaudevillian mugging to camera.

The gag here is that, in all other respects, Palmer is a thoroughly modern millennial. She’s obsessed with astrology (“It’s not exactly like science … But it is kind of like science”), describes the role of US presidents as “the most extreme form of an influencer” and – most millennial-coded of all – has learned to ride the waves of the gig economy, and social media, without going under.

“I don’t know if I have a super-salaciously interesting life,” she says, when I ask how she decides what to share publicly and what to hold back. “But it can’t just be for entertainment’s sake, it has to have a bigger meaning. Not in terms of, like, world peace, but if I’m going to get personal, if I’m going to get real with you, then how can it be of service?” Keke Palmer may be only 31, but in former-child-star years, that’s about 100.

Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative by Keke Palmer is published by Orion on 19 November.