Keke Palmer ties fame’s cost to her resilience

In “I Love Boosters,” Keke Palmer plays Corvette, a designer turned ringleader for shoplifters. In a candid conversation, the 32-year-old links the film’s chaos to her own childhood fame—describing pressure to be perfect, anxiety, and the “cost” behind becomin

NEW YORK — By the time Keke Palmer talks about her new movie, “I Love Boosters,” the surreal world Boots Riley builds almost feels secondary. Palmer doesn’t linger on the sex demons, workers’ strikes, or skinless corporate pawns for long. She jumps straight to the part that hits closest.

In the movie. in theaters now. Palmer plays Corvette. an aspiring designer who leads a group of shoplifters in stealing from high-fashion stores and reselling the merchandise at lower prices. The film is frequently whimsical and satirical, but Palmer says she understood Riley’s audacious vision immediately.

“I was like, ‘I want to go down this lane and see what he’s going to bring out of me, because I don’t think it’s going to be like any experience I’ve ever had,’ ” Palmer, 32, says. “At this point, having done this for so many years, you need that kind of experience.”

For Palmer, the strangeness of the story maps onto something real from her life: the pressure of being seen too early, and the nervous system it left behind.

She built her career by working at age 9. after roles including “Barbershop 2” and “Akeelah and the Bee.” She later became a household name among families as the star of Nickelodeon’s “True Jackson. VP. ” which ran for three seasons. Palmer grew up in the Chicago suburbs. the daughter of a teacher and a Catholic deacon. and she says her circumstances demanded adult-level steadiness before she was old enough.

By 12, she was the main breadwinner for her parents and three siblings.

“It probably did a lot more to my nervous system than I understand,” Palmer says now. “The adaptive intelligence that I’ve been able to create, by way of trying to survive my circumstances, has made me a strong performer. But the cost has been not always being embodied.”

She describes spending years “functioning from that side of myself that needed to be perfect.” In “I Love Boosters,” anxiety shows up in a literal way—represented by a giant boulder of negativity and stress that chases Corvette around.

To cope, Palmer says she found practices that let her step out of that constant self-monitoring. She points to strength training and vinyasa flow yoga as ways to help “take my mind off things and focus on something that feels rejuvenating.” When her schedule allows. she also enjoys attending spiritual and wellness retreats. adding: “I love a conference. I’m so in that bag.”.

The movie’s main antagonist, Christie Smith, is played by Demi Moore. Christie is a fast-fashion mogul whom Corvette idolizes before Christie steals one of her designs. Palmer frames the character’s power through the kind of authority she learned to recognize from experience.

She also credits support from women in her own life as she’s branched out beyond acting into producing, hosting, podcasting and other business ventures—naming Queen Latifah, Jessica Alba, and former first lady Michelle Obama.

But she hasn’t always felt protected from the industry’s edge.

“I really do give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to meeting somebody that is exceptional in this industry and they’re maybe not as friendly or open to share. ” Palmer says. “They’ve probably been doing this for a long time. Not to make excuses, but I don’t always personalize that, especially in a workspace.”.

When it comes to negativity, Palmer says she has little patience.

“I don’t come to work with a good attitude because I just want people to think I’m nice,” she says. “It’s because I also want to have a good day. I’ve never understood why some people’s version of power translates into making everybody miserable. One of the biggest things about my personality is like, ‘Let’s get through the day!’ ”.

That practical mindset shows up again when Palmer talks about how she lives, not just how she performs.

Palmer’s parents taught her to be practical and mindful with money from a young age. She and her 3-year-old son, Leo, live with her sisters. She doesn’t have an assistant and chooses to run her social media pages herself.

In 2021, she launched her own content platform, KeyTV Network, spotlighting underrepresented voices.

Palmer says she invested heavily in that platform: “I spent over 3 million of my own dollars to produce content for creators that were looking for a chance. and I didn’t get any of it back. ” she says. “Some people might say. ‘What the f— was that?’ But to me. that made more sense than me getting a Rolls-Royce. because I feel like that will come back to me. That’s where my frugality comes from: Is it going to appreciate?. If it’s really not, then I don’t see the point of going too hard in the paint.”.

Even her career next moves fit into a broader pattern she describes as reinvention rather than chasing approval.

“Boosters” arrives as a new chapter for Palmer, often described as a meme queen, who stars in the highly anticipated “Spaceballs: The New One” next year. She says that as a young twentysomething, she felt boxed in—pushed into supporting roles as the funny best friend and sidekick.

More recently, she’s taken lead roles in films including “Nope” and “One of Them Days,” and in the Peacock series “The ‘Burbs.”

After “True Jackson, VP” finished, Palmer says she went through what many child entertainers face: people weren’t sure how to place her once she wasn’t “a kid.”

“After ‘True Jackson. VP’ finished. I went through the typical phase that any child entertainer goes through where people don’t know what your brand is anymore outside of being a kid. so they don’t really know where to place you as an artist. ” Palmer says. “I really was able to reinvent myself through social media, or more specifically, the digital era.”.

She recalls criticism that framed her choices as a wrong turn—often centered on an idea of what her end goal “should” be.

“For a while. ‘people made me feel like I was going down the wrong path or they didn’t get what I was doing. ’ ” Palmer says. “It was a very limited perspective that they had for me. I always saw myself as a performer, but also a brand. … A lot of times when people would criticize me. it would be coming from a place of thinking that my end goal was to just get an Oscar.”.

In her view, the point was bigger than awards.

“In reality, ‘I really cared about being more of a cultural fixture than anything.’ ”

In the movie, Corvette fights to control her world—through hustle, fear, and defiance. In Palmer’s telling, her own story has always been about the same thing: not simply becoming famous, but surviving what fame demanded, and choosing what to carry forward from it.

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