Keke Palmer Remembers Her "Firsts"

My first tattoo, I think it says,

Don't cast thy pearls before swine.

I didn't hold up to it. [laughs]

What's up, Team Vogue? It's me, Keke Palmer,

and I'm going through my firsts.

[upbeat music]

The first thing I do when I wake up is

go check on Leo, my son.

If he's not in the bed with me,

then he's down the hall in his room.

And so I just go check on him to see,

you know, if he's ready to get up,

or sometimes he might be still sleeping.

That's the first thing I do, first thing I think about.

The first thing I do to set myself up for a good day is

just think to myself, We gonna have a good day.

You know what I mean?

I just, I literally have a good attitude.

I tell myself, whether I woke up only, you know,

getting four hours of sleep or eight hours of sleep,

or you know, whatever it might be, I just tell myself,

Hey, you know, it's another day. We gonna go right at it.

The first time I went viral was for, And the gag is!

It was the and the gag is era.

I started doing this sketch, you know, on my Instagram page.

But the gag is...

The gag has him gagging and now he won't stop calling.

[laughs comically]

I would say something and I would say,

Hey, but the gag is, which is like,

you know, the punchline, the ticket.

And that was the first time that I kind of went viral.

The first TV show that made me feel understood,

I'd have to say was Mo to the, E to the...

Moesha. Yes, that show is so good. I just loved it.

First of all, Moesha, now that I'm grown, she was a brat.

She was mean as hell to her daddy, Frank.

Frank never did nothing but try to love her.

And it was just really messed up that she was really

actually like a very bratty...

I mean, and she grew up

either in Leimert Park or LA Heights.

She was low-key Black bourgeoisie.

I mean, I made a lot of realizations,

but I still loved Moesha.

And the Ohagi episode, oh my gosh.

The first thing I thought when I launched KeyTV was,

Oh my gosh, what am I doing? Am I wasting all this money?

Because honey, [laughs] it was a full Keke investment

and I was just thinking, you know,

Hey, is this the right thing?

But the cool thing when you're creating something new

is that you learn as you go.

That's what I've done. I have not stopped.

And at every step, and every corner,

I've faced things head on with my team

and we've been able to not only accomplish

what we've wanted in this first year, but even more.

Where we're going with KeyTV

just becomes clearer and clearer.

And so I do say to anybody out there

that's starting something, you know,

you might have a blanket idea, you know, you might have

to switch gears and it'll change as time goes

and it'll continue to develop.

But don't think that you have to start

when everything is 100%, because that doesn't really exist.

It's just you believing in it,

you having that seed of faith,

and continuing to build on top of that

and taking it one day at a time.

The first time I walked away from something big?

Ooh, it probably was Half Nelson with Ryan Gosling

when I was probably like 12 or 13.

The movie was about him being a teacher who was on drugs

and one of his students sold him drugs.

And my mom was like, You can't go from spelling words

to selling drugs to Ryan Gosling.

So that was like what we walked away from.

The first first time I truly felt confident in myself,

I'll just take it all the way back,

was when I did my first solo when I was five years old

at St. Benedict in Illinois.

I sang These Three Kings from Orient Are type of song.

I forget how it goes, but I did the performance

and I remember feeling really proud of myself

because the mic was too high for me,

but I pulled that mic out and I just started singing.

[laughs]

Oh my gosh, the first time, you know what?

My best friend always asks me,

What were you thinking when you first held Leo?

And I always tell her the same thing.

I just thought, I love you, son.

I'm so happy to see you, son.

Like, I don't know, I felt like

it was an episode of Family Matters.

I just felt really happy, but it also felt sweet

and intimate, but really joyous.

You know what I mean? Just truly joyous.

I just remember pushing him out and you know,

he immediately got on my chest and he made that little like,

[imitates baby whining]

You know how babies do.

And I was waiting on it 'cause I done seen some spooky reels

and so I was like, Let me hear that. Let me.

And he was like... [imitates baby whining]

I was like, I love you, son. I just love you so much, son.

My first tattoo. Almost forgot about it.

It's under my boob. Damn, I almost feel like, is it there?

After the breastfeeding, it's disappeared.

I think it says something along the lines of

don't cast thy pearls before swine.

I didn't hold up to it. [laughs]

The first song I wrote was this song

with my mom when I was nine years old.

And it was called...

♪ Summer fun ♪

♪ It covers me ♪

♪ It makes me feel so at ease ♪

♪ Love to know what turns away ♪

Wait.

♪ Put in three words ♪

♪ Everything is lovely ♪

First of all, obviously my mom

was heavy-handed on the writing.

I remember writing it with her.

She was like, Y'all wanna write a song?

'Cause my mom was always writing songs and recording

and she had her own recording equipment.

She would be able to produce herself,

write her music, and record her

and we just thought it was so cool.

And so we would bug her from time to time

and she said, Y'all wanna do a song?

And we are like, Yeah, we wanna do a song.

And then we did Summer Fun.

My first big purchase?

Oh, probably a Dell laptop.

Child, I wanted to play Sims so bad.

It couldn't work on the PC I had

because it would like, crash.

Y'all remember the Sims?

Like, the game is so much juice

that it would crash your system.

So the only way I could play it was if I got a Dell laptop

and I remember, oh my gosh, zoom, zoom. [laughs]

The first moment that I realized I was famous

was probably when I went to Universal Studios

after True Jackson, VP had aired.

It was probably like a year

into the show being on television.

I remember like, within an hour's time,

I had like, a hundred people surrounding me

in a circle wanting to take pictures and I was like,

Oh my gosh. Things have changed.

It was really, really shocking.

I was just like, This can't even be real that

these people are doing this and acting this way.

And that was the first time that I kind of noticed,

you know, that, whoa,

something's different with my life now.

The first time that I saw the meme of

Baby, this is Keke Palmer, I was like,

Yo, that is so funny,

because the way that the girls said it.

You know, and just to give you some background story,

there was this meme of me with these really harsh bangs.

First of all, I hated that hair.

I told the lady that I wanted,

Oh, this is my first time getting a weave,

and she gave me just like the worst closure.

I hated my hair so, so, so, so bad.

Anyway, this picture went viral

and somebody commented underneath it

and was like, Excuse me, please take this down please,

because this is my cousin that was hit by a metro train.

And so then a girl was like,

Why did this girl DM me lying like this?

Because baby, this is Keke Palmer.

This is my Keke Palmer.

And after I seen that, I just loved it so, so much,

and I got to talk to the girl

and I named my podcast off of that very famous meme.

The first celebrity impression that I mastered,

and this is since I was a little kid,

was Angela Bassett, honey.

It was always Angela Bassett because people always told me,

especially after I did Akeelah and the Bee,

people would tell me all the time

how much I looked like her and everything like that.

And I loved Michael Jackson's story The American Dream

when I was a kid growing up and so I always would do,

You a liar, you're a cheat, and I don't want you.

I don't want you.

And everybody would, I mean, literally, all my life,

especially whenever I did a move with Queen Latifah,

Queen Latifah would make me do the Tina Turner.

You ain't got to tell me but once! It's okay. It's okay.

She would literally, after every like lunch break

on Joyful Noise, she'd be like,

Keke do Angela, do Angela.

So for years, she knew about

the Angela impression before you guys.

The first person that I contact anytime

anything happens with me is my mom.

Every single time I'm always like,

Mom, did you see?

Or Mom, did you hear?

Girl, you won't believe.

Whether it's tea or work or anything,

I will always tell my mom first.

Oh my gosh, I'll never forget the first time

that I introduced Lady Miss Jacqueline

was on the set of Scream Queens, it was the second season,

and I was working with my, still to this day,

producing partner, writing partner, Max Wyatt,

and I always end up sounding like a old lady sometimes.

Like I'm just like, Yes, honey, you know?

And he loved when I would do that.

And so he said, What do you think about doing this hashtag,

creating this kind of like, running sketch

called 'Southern Bell Insults?'

And that was the beginning of Lady Miss Jacqueline.

Like, even before we named her,

it was just like a Southern belle giving insults.

I can really take off my gloves

and treat you like a sack of potatoes

and cheap frock that you are.

And we just kept doing it and slowly,

we started to develop this world for her,

and he and I, to this day, are just like,

astonished about what we've been able to capture.

She's like Mama Dea.

[upbeat hip-hop music] ♪ Keke, we love you ♪

The first thing I want to say to people who come up to me

and says, Keke, do you love me? is,

You thought you did something, didn't you?

You thought you...

You thought you was the first.

No. No.

Thank you, Teen Vogue, for joining me on my Firsts.

[gentle rhythmic music]