Keke Palmer on Why She Wants to Be a Bit More “Behind the Scenes” For a While
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The post Keke Palmer on Why She Wants to Be a Bit More “Behind the Scenes” For a While appeared first on Consequence.
For Keke Palmer, life as an actor, writer, singer, host and more means getting to explore every one of her interests. “Everything that I’m interested in does some way revolve around entertainment,” she tells Consequence. “So, obviously this is the industry for me, but I don’t think that there’s just one aspect of the industry that I like. I think I like sharing my personality. I think I like having interesting conversations. I think I like working in production. I think I like being in front of the camera. I think I like writing scripts. I think I like so many different things.”
Newly added to the list: Podcasting. Tuesday, November 1st marks the debut of Baby, This Is Keke Palmer, a new Amazon Music original series executive produced by Palmer and Wondery, in which Palmer gets to explore topics that interest her with the help of members of her personal circle (including her mother Sharon), as well as experts. The premiere episode, available now, tackles the subject of OnlyFans from a positive and open-minded viewpoint, with Palmer interviewing Blac Chyna about her experience with the site and how it’s affected her career.
Palmer’s impressive acting resume includes key roles in this summer’s Nope and the under-appreciated 2019 film Hustlers, but her experience as a host goes back to when she led the 2014 BET talk show Just Keke at the age of 19.
“The thing that I like about podcasts, that’s different than a talk show, is that there’s no strict format,” she says. “And you also get to go a lot deeper than you normally would on a regular daytime or even late-night show, and you get to explore just different conversations. It’s just a totally different atmosphere. I’m a very curious person, and I like picking other people’s brains, and with podcasts, there’s so much discovery. So you can talk to an expert or you can talk to a professor, or you can talk to somebody in a different or extremely strange field and end up having a really cool discussion. That all excited me.”
In general, Palmer tends to find that she needs variety in her projects. For example, if she’s just finished filming a heavy drama like this spring’s thriller Alice, she says, “Well, I can’t do another drama for about a year. If I do do another movie, it’s gotta be a comedy. But most of the time I leave a project like that and say, ‘I want to do something personality-based, because I don’t want to not be myself for a while.’ Because with acting, I’m being someone else, and sometimes that can be taxing. So then I’m like, you know what? I want to be my flamboyant self for a while. Then sometimes, I get tired of that and I’m like, you know, I want to pop into a character that’s dull, because I’m tired of being flamboyant all the time.”
Sometimes, these things all happen at once: “While doing Nope, I was flexing another muscle — I was writing a book called Southern Belle Insults for Amazon. And then I was also filming a movie for my album, Big Boss. So I wasn’t exactly in my flamboyant self, but I didn’t totally derail from that.”
Baby, This Is Keke Palmer (Amazon)
Alice, she says, was a project “where I had to get really intense, and it left me a little bit sad. So I think Nope and Big Boss and Southern Belle Insults were all a way to shed some of that sadness. And now I’m kind of reaching my breaking point and I want to shut down the flamboyant side just a little bit. Not totally, but I want to be behind the scenes a little bit more, and exercise what it feels like to not be totally defined by my personality in totality.”
In general, her multi-hyphenate lifestyle “has been a blessing, because it has helped me to maintain such a diverse and long career. So it’s something that I’m grateful for and it is something that I would encourage anybody to do in any field, is to continue to acquire different skills. For me, it was not something I felt like I had to do, but I do think, hey, if you can continue to grow in your field and learn different trades within it, why not? Because it gets tiring doing the same thing all the time, personally.”
That’s why the podcast has her excited, because “I’m being myself, but you don’t always have to see me and I get to actually have really interesting discussions and show more of the intellectual side of my personality. My intellectual side is still naturally flamboyant, but it’s slightly different.”
Palmer adds that, “For any podcast that you listen to, it’s like you’re stepping into that person’s world, but a deeper layer. I think most people know that I’m quirky. Most people know that I’m curious. Most people know that I’m a spontaneous person and most people know I don’t know everything, and so they love the fact that I’m like, ‘Oops, sorry, I don’t know who that is.’ So I hope that they will enjoy the discoveries that I’m gonna be having on this journey alongside them.”
Beyond OnlyFans, other subjects that Palmer’s interested in using the podcast to explore are the way that television has changed over recent years — “the beauty of multi-cam sitcoms is that they actually were talking about nuanced subjects, but they were talking about them in the way that we usually experienced them every day, in everyday life,” she says. She also wants to get MySpace Tom (a.k.a. Tom Anderson) to come on the show to talk about social media, after getting to connect with him via Instagram about the topic.
“I DMed him once, like, ‘Tom, what the hell you been at man? You literally dropped this whole bomb on us, and then you dipped out without a word.’ And this is what he said to me: ‘When I made MySpace, I naively thought the reason why people hate people and there’s so much horrible stuff going on is because they don’t see other people’s worlds. So I thought if I created a place called MySpace, when people saw other people’s faces, that they would have understanding for one another, they could have more compassion for one another, they could have more just interest and understanding for one another.'”
As Palmer continues, “Those are the conversations I want to have, whether it be about pop culture or your sex life and how to spice it up. I think the range is there. But yeah, that’s pretty much Keke Palmer.”
Baby, This Is Keke Palmer is available now on Amazon Music. New episodes debut on Tuesdays.
Keke Palmer on Why She Wants to Be a Bit More “Behind the Scenes” For a While
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