‘People find me funny even when I’m not trying to be’

‘Nope’ actor Keke Palmer the star of innumerable internet memes speaks to Adam White about childhood fame, the perils of online celebrity, and saying no to screen nudity

- Adam White

The problem with being Keke Palmer, Keke Palmer tells me, is that people tend to want you at your most Keke Palmer. “I think there’s an assumption that I’ll definitely say one of my catchphrases,” the actor, mogul and queen of all things online explains, somewhat pensively. “People find me funny even when I’m not trying to be funny, which I guess is a good thing? But I sometimes push up against it. I don’t want to be that annoying person who’s entertaining at all costs, jumping out...” She sighs. “Saying my catchphrases.”

Today, at least, she’s not doing that at all. Speaking from her Los Angeles home, Palmer doesn’t once say the line. Or the other one. Or, really, any of the silky, sassy, sitcomy turns of phrase that long ago transformed Palmer from a conventionally famous actor – so mesmeric in films such as Hustlers and Jordan Peele’s Nope – into the closest person Hollywood has to a living internet meme. “I hate to say it, I hope I don’t sound ridiculous... I don’t know who this man is,” she said during a Vanity Fair “lie detector test” video in 2019, after being asked to – for far too convoluted reasons to succinctly explain here – identify the former US vice-president Dick Cheney from a picture. “He could be walking down the street... I wouldn’t know a thing. Sorry to this man.”

Those 10 seconds of confusion – watched 1.9 million times on YouTube, then millions of times more once it was disseminated, remixed and reappropriated across social media – made Palmer an internet superstar. It was arguably the rich inflections in her voice that did it, the confused stress placed on “this man is”, the wise, comic indifference to her “wouldn’t know a thing”. Other lines of hers – always delivered with an unpredictable, sing-song zhuzh – joined this digital pantheon soon after. “But the gag is…!” “Now who the hell are they?”; “Baby, this is Keke Palmer…”; “It was dripping on my