Keke Palmer Is & Always Will Be That Girl

Here’s the thing people always want to know about celebrities: Are they actually like that? You see Keke Palmer onscreen, and she’s magnetic. You hear the way people talk about her (gush about her even), and you might think, Is this real? Can one person be that... likable? Is Palmer, who makes everyone feel like her best friend, really that girl?

Dear reader, she is.

Within seconds of our video call, she had complimented me (“Your eyes are so pretttttty!”). She has the energy of someone who’d happily plop down on your couch, kick her shoes off, and get into it. Of course, her resume reads like four people’s careers: Emmy-winning host, actor, author, singer, podcaster, entrepreneur, now the face of The Voice: Celebrity. But when you’re face-to-face with Palmer, she’s just Lauren. And the gag is, of all the things we don’t have in common, the one we do is the great equalizer: motherhood.

Not surprisingly, Palmer’s 3-year-old son, Leo, seems to have inherited his mom’s dynamic personality. By her telling, he’s expressive and sassy, not to mention already a skilled negotiator. He’s also the reason she’s newly partnered with Sanofi to help parents get informed about RSV ahead of this year’s season — a conversation that started, like a lot of them do, in the pediatrician’s office.

Below, we chat about it all, from parenting and her pickleball-filled retirement plan to getting advice from the Queen and being OK with being angry.

SM: You literally have one million things going on at all times, and on top of all that, you have a 3-year-old! What’s the most Keke thing about Leo?

KP: Oh, he's sassy. A lot of eye movements, very facially expressive. He definitely knows how to give you a look of death.

SM: What has he done lately that has just completely surprised you?

KP: Oh my gosh. Well, I think what's so funny about this is they learn how to manipulate very early. And it's so cute, but you got to make sure that you're teaching them because my son, he'll do this thing where he is like, "Mommy, you're so pretty." He'll hug me and he'll kiss me. And then, as he comes from kissing me, he says, "Can I get on your iPad?" It's like he knows. It's like he knows how to bring joy and a good vibe, and then he lands the ask, and it's like, You're only 3. So seeing him know how to get what he wants is so interesting.

He also is very assertive. As he's gotten older, there's more options for us to do stuff because we can go to the movies together, we can go bike riding, there’s so much more because he's turning into a big boy — and so he'll tell the nannies, "You're going to go, and it's going to be me and mommy." He's very like, "Yeah, let's wrap this up." He knows that, "Yeah, I have the time with the nannies, but you know what? Now it's time for me and mommy and only me and mommy."

So he's very into the me and mommy time and super vocal about when it's happening. And “I want to be in your bed tonight”… which thrills me.

SM: I was going to say, I'm sure you're not too broken up about it!

KP: No!

SM: I know you and your mom are so close. Now that you're a mom, is there anything you appreciate differently about her?

KP: Everything. Everything. Everything. Me and my mom have really mostly had great times, but we had some moments. Those pivotal moments: early teens, young adult, the typical places where things would get tough. But more often than not, I always felt like that I had a really fierce, cool mom. Now I realize that she's next level.

When I think about her, and even when I think about my dad, just their ability to not project their fears onto us. My parents literally raised us to think in ways that now I know, and I have full perspective around their life, their upbringing, and who I am today, and even how I am with Leo; it's like parenthood will make you turn into somebody that you didn't know you could be and provide things for your child that you never even had.

So when I think about my mom, what kind of mother she was, that takes so much courage, that takes so much selflessness to be able to put whatever your thing is aside and make sure that your baby can flourish. It takes a lot of self-work. I think we can get so caught up in what our parents didn't do that we don't realize that what we see is because of what they did do. What I see and I can respond and I can act the way that I act because I had that as my parent. So yeah, they're the people I go to with everything with Leo. They're the ones I go to because I'm like, "You guys are simply iconic."

SM: I bet they're so proud of you! Well, going into this time of year, parents worry nonstop about their babies getting sick. Walk us through the conversation with Leo's pediatrician that made RSV kind of click as something you need to take seriously.

KP: I wasn't really thinking that much on it because I just heard about it from the news — RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus — and I was thinking, OK, maybe this is something that I should do. So I just asked the doctor about it because I thought it was just kind of the cold type of vibe, but then he was telling me that it actually can lead to a serious lung infection and that it remains the leading cause of hospitalization in babies under 1.

So then I became very curious and wanted to get as much information that I can, and that's when he brought up Beyfortus or nirsevimab-alip. I realized that, you know what? This is probably a good way to protect Leo against the serious infections that can happen because of RSV.

SM: What would you tell a parent who feels overwhelmed about what to ask their doctor?

KP: I think a good thing to ask is what is prevention, right? So you go through this conversation with your doctor saying, "What's really going on out there at this age with my child? What are the list of things that I can look into? What are the websites? Where are the places that I can go?" And then you do the research yourself.

At the end of the day, we got to trust our own selves and our own opinions, and I'm big on pray on it. And don't let fear be what's guiding you. Let information and you being discerning in your choice be what guides you because I don't believe in fear-mongering, especially for moms. We're scared enough already. Postpartum doesn't last just a few months or a year; it lasts the lifetime. We're forever changed, and we're forever scared about our kid — and we can't protect them from everything, but we can be preventative and provide protection that may help them in the future.

SM: Such good advice. OK, now I want to talk about Ms. Lauren, Ms. Keke, and how you care for yourself. What nourishes your soul?

KP: Oh my gosh, I love Pilates, but even more so than Pilates, I love the community that Pilates gives, and I love the community that comes with going to a class ... I don't like a private class. I like being there with a whole bunch of women and seeing the girl to the right of me and being like, "Are we going to make it?" That's what I live for. It really makes me so happy to be in a room full of women sweating and just feeling the energy of us all.

I love to get into a little massage moment, a little lymphatic drainage, a little self-care. I try to do these things with myself at least biweekly and schedule my self-care as much as I do the business.

Then I'm heavy on what type of therapies or what type of meditations or even group talks, things that allow me the space to share things that maybe you otherwise wouldn't be sharing because you don't have any place to put it down. So finding places of safety where I'm allowed to talk about the hard things.

I think that's important too, because especially sometimes I feel like I'm one of these people, women or even Black women, that my rebellion is joy, but I’m not always happy. So that's been a big thing that I've been exploring this year. Definitely in my music and in my writing, I've really been honest about the fact that I can be pissed off.

SM: Absolutely. You've said before that you would consider retiring early... what would retired Keke look like?

KP: Oh my gosh. Retired Keke would probably look like doing some teaching, whether it be on business, branding, the arts, marketing, performance studies, different things like that. It would look like being at all my son's games. I don't even know what sport we at — all of his games, chess matches, whatever he's doing, I'm there. It also looks like me going to all my pickleball games with my mom group, getting into a clinic of sorts, and maybe even going pro.

It looks like me producing and platforming so many people off my name. It looks like the Keke Palmer brand really becoming something that is less about the person and more about what it platforms. That's, to me, the future of what I would want retirement to look like. It's not that I'm angry or I'm tired or I don't want to perform. It's that it's other people's turn to shine. I really want to be a steward of the next generation because I think that's also how things compound. It can't just sit with me. It has to live out.

SM: Girl, sign me up with the first class! I love that Queen Latifah has played your mom twice, and now she’s a coach on The Voice: Celebrity that you’re hosting. Does she still give you mom energy on set? Advice?

KP: Love Queen. She does give me advice. I think one of the first pieces of advice she gave me was to know that people are watching me, and the reason why they are responding is because of what I put forward. It's my work ethic. I was giving her a lot of props for putting in a good word for me on a particular project; it was cool how she brought it back because she was like, "Well, it's not just me doing it. It's because I see what you're doing."

She was basically telling me that I had value and that that's why she wanted to collaborate with me, and to be aware of my value is being predicated on how I show up and what I do, that people are watching, and me being somebody that people like to work with. That was really touching to me. It made me very aware of how far that can go.

Then, on the phone literally just the other night, she's talking to me about the school that her son is going to, and we're having a deep conversation around higher education, but also wanting our children to be grounded … And then also I want diversity. A lot of these schools that are known for higher education don't often have a lot of diversity in them.

She was really comforting, and she was saying, "You got to think, you're not going to get everything. There's going to be some things that are really important to you and some things that really aren't that important to you, and that might change. It might change from when he's in middle school to when he goes to high school. You can create opportunities elsewhere, whether it's in sports or after-school activities.” So she was really having that mom moment.

Without completely going into my fan mode, it's like, damn, I've really known Queen my entire life, since I was 9, and she's gone from encouraging me to follow my dreams to encouraging me to acknowledge the fact that I'm honoring my dream to her telling me that I should trust myself in my motherhood choices and that there are more ways to basically skin a cat.

That's crazy that I'm so blessed to have had that kind of connection with her because, I mean, she's the queen.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.