Keke Palmer can apply the “lessons” of her early fame to her relationships today.
The 30-year-old actress, whose real name is Lauren Keyana Palmer, moved from her hometown of Harvey, Illinois, to Hollywood with her parents and sisters in the late 2000s to start her career. Although she found many things “confusing” at the time, she is now able to “understand” others better.
She told Entertainment Tonight: “I think a lot of the lessons I learned during that confusing time about how to deal with life are skills that I can still apply to any relationship today.”
“Seeing things from other people’s perspectives, even in the early years when I became ‘Keke Palmer’, and seeing how that changed the dynamic in (our) family, helped me learn to understand people better.
“It was more like, ‘Well, okay, this is Keke and we do everything for Keke and everything that is Keke,’ but actually the Keke Palmer brand is something that has helped all of us move forward in different areas, so that’s great.”
Keke has two sisters, Loreal (34) and Lawrencia (23). Her older sister stressed in the joint interview that she was “never jealous” of her sister despite her sudden rise to fame.
She said: “I talk about how when people find out we’re sisters, they always ask, ‘Have you ever been jealous?’ and then they say, ‘No, I’ve never been jealous in the sense that they think.’ It was more like, ‘What’s my acting? What’s my entertainment? Why can’t I find my thing?’
“I literally said to someone just the other day, ‘She’s just a born entertainer. She could be paid pennies and she’d still do it because she’s been doing this her whole life.'”
However, the ‘Nope’ actress – who has 15-month-old son Leo with ex-partner Darius Jackson – admitted it took her “many years” to get through those early days of her Nickelodeon fame because she felt “responsible” for her entire family.
She said: “But it still seems so focused on one person and it’s taken me many years to process some of it myself, feeling like I’m responsible for everybody. So when I hear you talk about it, it’s really like, wow, that’s just a story I told myself… and then you tell yourself a whole different story and we’re both just killing ourselves with our stories.”
