n 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 , releasing R&B pop music , hosting gameshows , talkshows and her own podcast , all the while regularly serving up sassy memes to the hungry internet hordes as casually as McDonald’s serves fries.
Content creation is a great thing to leverage and to diversify your portfolio … but I really was just following the creativity bug 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.
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.