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Hangin' With Archives
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Keke Palmer:Akeelah and the Beeby Lynn B
When we chatted with her recently in L.A.’s famed Mondrian Hotel (which houses the young Hollywood haunt “Sky Bar”) we learned right off that Keke was in control! The young actress looks much more “with it” than her character Akeelah does. We liked her little-to-no make-up look and her long hair with bangs. We complimented her pale pink pantsuit and green blouse and were messed with bigtime.. Check out our fun interview…. AGW: Cute outfit. Is it yours or by a designer? Keke: [totally straight face] I made it. Yeah. My mom used to sew with me back in Chicago. We made it together. AGW: Wow! Keke: [laughing] Gotcha! I’m a jokester. I don’t know who made it, I just put it on. AGW: You had us going there! Okay, serious stuff. The movie is a little about finding strength to go on. A turning point in your career was when you went to audition for ‘The Lion King’ musical and didn’t get it. Where did you find the strength to go on? Keke: That’s something I think I just developed because I grew up in church. I think I just developed the confidence and my mom and my dad told me to just believe in myself. I had that support from my family just to keep on going. Don’t feel defeat in anything. AGW: You did get into the finals for that though. Keke: Out of one hundred kids I made it down to the top fifteen and I did pretty good for my first time so I decided that it was fun and I wanted to keep on doing it. That’s when I decided to audition for Barbershop 2. When I got the part, the producer told my mom ‘she’s really good. You need to take her to California. She’d do really well out there’. AGW: Did you just up and move then? Keke: At first my mom was ‘well, I don’t know’ because all of our family was in Chicago and we’d have to come out here and start over. After a while of auditioning in Chicago, there weren’t many things there and a lot of waiting so we decided it would be a good thing to move out here and we did. First couple of weeks, I got an episode of ‘Cold Case’ and a national Fanny May commercial and a national K-Mart commercial. After that was ‘The Wool Cap’ [TV movie] and then came Akeelah and the Bee and after that came ‘E.R.’ and ‘Knights of the South Bronx’ then ‘Medea’. AGW: You’ve been busy non-stop! Akeelah wins spelling bees. Are you a good speller? KeKe: [shakes head ‘no’]. I’m a little good but not as good as Akeelah is. I learned a couple of things. AGW: What did you learn from working with Angela Bassett as your mom? Keke: We had so much fun on that set. In one particular scene where I had to cry, Angela really helped me in that scene because I was trying to get that emotion out and Doug [the director] was like a couple of feet away from me. Angela came to me and said ‘just think about if everybody who helped you had to leave you and then you have nobody to help you anymore’. Right after that, I just started crying and Doug was ‘roll it, roll it, roll it’. Then we did the scene. I tell everybody that she helped me. AGW: Was it like a mother/daughter relationship? Keke: Yeah, it really was. AGW: Do you think that, being in show biz, you missed out on a normal childhood? Keke: No. When I started to get more into Akeelah which was more nerve-wracking, I started to feel a little upset and was not having too much fun. My mom and I went back to Chicago for a little while. We visited some of our family and I really realized that this is what I want to do. I didn’t want to give up on acting. It’s so much fun meeting all these people and doing stuff like this. It was what I wanted to do so I took that extra step and kept on going. AGW: The kids actors in the film were wonderful. Did you become friends with them? Like JR Villarreal who plays your sort of boyfriend Javier? Keke: Yeah. We were laughing so much on that kissing part. They had us do it like twenty times before we even shot and said ‘get all of your giggles out’ because we were laughing. Me and Javier were running around and having fun on set. A lot of the kids in the movie, that was their first time so we had a lot of fun. Questions were asked and I was happy that I was able to answer them. So much fun. AGW: Akeelah almost loses a good friend because the friend is jealous. Have any of your old friends abandoned you since you are in the movies now? Keke: In a way, I kind of abandoned them because of my move. I remember I was in Chicago.. South Village, Illinois. When I first moved there, I had this best friend Estes Walker and I told her I was going to live there for like ten years. I had only been living there for a couple of months. It turned into a year. I told her I’d be living there for the rest of my life then I kind of just up and left. I bet she feels kind of upset about that. I don’t know what to do. Too late.
Keke: Yeah, we do. I talk a million words a minute. My mom took a long time with me, ‘slow it down, enunciate and project your words’. It took a long time because me and my sister have our own language my mom says, so it was hard for us to slow it down. I’ve learned to slow it down and try to get better but I’m really worse than Akeelah. AGW: Dakota Fanning is about your age. Is her success an inspiration to you? Keke: I don’t even compare it because I’m not going to get her roles. She’s not going to get my roles. I just think of us both doing our separate own things. She does her roles and she’s a good actress and I hope she thinks I’m good too. AGW: Do you have a mentor in your life kind of like Dr. Larabee in the film? Keke: My mom is always there for me and is always with me and taking care of me but she doesn’t push as hard as Dr. Larabee. AGW: Did you get to attend any of the National Spelling Bees or just watch them on tape? Keke: My birthday came right around the time Doug told me I’d got the part. He gave me a lot of spelling bee stuff. He gave me the Spellbound movie and the 2003 National Spelling Bee. A lot of Spelling Bee stuff came up around the time I got Akeelah so I did get a chance to see the 2004 National Spelling Bee. AGW: Can you actually use the big words you learned for this? Keke: No. I know what they mean but I’m never going to go up to somebody and go ‘I love the prestidigitation of the magician. He’s so great with his hands’. I’m not really going to say that. Every now and then my mom puts out a big word. I may say cliché. I might say ‘innate’ but I’m not ever going to say those big words. I don’t think so. AGW: Can you really jump rope like Akeelah? Keke: Yeah. I double dutch a lot. When we were doing the movie on lunch breaks and stuff like that I’d be going out and double dutching with all the girls and having fun times with it. AGW: Was jumping rope while spelling based on any real person? Keke: In the National Spelling Bee some kids wrote on the back of their number to see how the word was spelled or kicked their foot or did semi-circles and so Doug had to make something up that was normal for the spelling bee but also subtle so people would know that it was something that nobody really does. I thought it was a smart thing to do and really worked for the movie. AGW: How easy is it to spell a word while you are skipping rope? Keke: It was pretty easy for me except for sometimes, I’m tall and had to swing the rope over my head really hard. Sometimes it would hit the bushes and stuff like that but it was pretty easy to do it. AGW: Did you see any strange tricks kids use to spell their words at the Bee? Keke: I never saw kids that did anything crazy. I saw this one kid that rocked like that [she demonstrates]. I thought that was a little bit odd but my mom worked with autistic kids and I saw that I thought maybe there was something wrong there but I remembered in the script that Akeelah did something [to remember her words] so I thought that must be what he does. AGW: Do you have a musical artist that you are into? Keke: Yeah. Chris Brown [big grin] Oh yeah! Chris Brown is great. AGW: You had three big talent agencies battling to sign you. How was that experience? Keke: I loved the attention but I’m sure my mom and dad had a lot of stuff on their backs trying to find the one that would be best. We didn’t want too big of an agency because then they wouldn’t focus on helping me. They would be focusing on their big people and maybe wouldn’t have sent me out on Akeelah and the Bee. We chose the right agency. AGW: Is Keke your real name? Keke: True story is, my sister, when she was four years old, had an imaginary friend named Keke. When I was born, she wanted my name to be Keke. I was born Keanna Palmer but sometimes, just to not make her embarrassed, we say it came from Keanna but it really does come from her imaginary friend. AGW: Did you help with Akeelah’s look for the film? The glasses.. the hair? Keke: Well, I’m wearing contacts right now but I do wear glasses and I was much shorter when I auditioned for the movie. I was like four nine. I’m five four now. So, I wore a puffy little shirt with overalls and gym shoes. The outfit was much bigger so I’d look like a tomboy. I had my hair in a ponytail in the back. So sometimes I went in with my glasses on. It depended on the scene. When I was with Dr. Larabee, I put the glasses on because I thought he’s going to help her spell and she feels comfortable wearing her glasses around him. He’s not going to judge her. AGW: What actor would you love to act with? Keke: Will Smith because I love ‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’. It’s my favorite show. Me and my sister watch it all of the time. I’d love to do a movie with him. AGW: What subjects do you do well in? Do you get tutored on the set? Keke: I get tutored on the set and then my mom helps me sometimes at home. Every Monday and Wednesday, I go to school and my teacher there helps me. But, my favorite subject is English. My worst is Math and World History.. huh uh, I don’t like them. World History? We learn about that on the news and that’s good but to have to read those hundred pages, your eyes burn off. I’m tired. When I auditioned for the movie, Doug asked me did I read the script. I said ‘no’. That thing was like two hundred and twenty-two pages but, as the movie went on he ‘smalled’ it down and me and my mom and sisters read it together. I didn’t read it all by myself. AGW: Won’t you have to read scripts in the future? Keke: My mom and I sometimes read it together. Sometimes she’ll read and tell me about it just in case there’s a director that wants me to read a script and I’ll pretend I really read it and say ‘I loved the part where she did a back-flip and landed into the pool. That was the best part of the movie’. AGW: Are you putting money away for college? Keke: Yes. They put money in a trust fund at first and in the bank and after that, I’m going on a shopping spree Sunday. Can’t wait! Goin’ shoppin’. Maybe buy some real knitting stuff so I can make an outfit like this. I do knit. I learned on ‘The Wool Cap’ set. AGW: What is next for you? Keke: I love to sing and dance. I was doing that before I was acting. My mom had a recording studio in the basement. I just got a record deal with Atlantic Records. I’m working on that right now and doing a lot of recording. R&B and hip hop. AGW: Did you crack up between scenes on this movie? It’s so serious a lot of the time. Keke: I do that a lot. Even when I’m going to do a sad scene, I’d be like ‘hey, hey, yeah, yeah’ , then ‘action’ [she makes a very serious face]. That would be me every single scene. Doug says he’s going to put that on the bloopers so you guys can see it on the DVDs. AGW: Did you keep in touch with any of the kid actors in the film? Keke: You can’t keep up with everyone but I did keep up with some of them. Some of the actors were from APCH, A Place Called Home. I’ve been there a couple of times and talked to them to see how they are doing. AGW: Akeelah is a little afraid of her own success. I gather that you’re not. Keke: No. I’m not. I love it all. I can’t wait! I love everything, going to the premieres and having so much fun. My mom tells me that if it’s no more fun and I don’t feel happy about it then it’s time to stop but I’m having fun right now.
Pictures courtesy of and copyright Lionsgate Films, 2006
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Young
actress Keke Palmer turns 13 in August if she doesn’t get so enthusiastic
and bubbly that she just explodes before then! Keke, who plays lead character
Akeelah in the inspirational Akeelah and the Bee, is a live wire.
Like her character, a precocious girl from South L.A., nothing will keep
Keke down. Her in-your-face comedy impressed critics when she had a small
part as Queen Latifah’s young niece in Barbershop 2 when
she was only nine. She has had various roles on TV and was in Madea’s
Family Reunion. Keke is a double threat having just signed a recording
contract with Atlantic Records. 
AGW:
Laurence Fishburne’s character Dr. Larabee wants Akeelah to speak
properly. Do you and your friends talk a lot of slang?