Keke Palmer

Keke Palmer (born 1993) has been working on screen since 2004, when she debuted in Barbershop 2: Back in Business. Two years later she carried Akeelah and the Bee, and then went the Nickelodeon route: the title role in True Jackson, VP, a debut album called So Uncool in 2007, the television film Rags. Child stardom of that kind usually ends in a decade of nothing.

Hers did not, because she is a genuinely fast comic performer and the industry eventually found a use for it. Palmer talks over people, changes register mid-sentence, and can turn an aside into the largest thing in a scene. Nope (2022) is the film that made this legible to everyone: as Emerald Haywood she is loud, opportunistic and impossible to look away from, and the movie is built to let her be. Hustlers used a smaller version of the same energy, and Scream Queens let her be the one person in the cast reacting sensibly.

The career now runs on several tracks at once. There is the voice work, Peaches across the Ice Age films and Izzy in Lightyear; there are two Primetime Emmys, one of them for a short form comedy or drama series; there is a Broadway credit as Ella in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical; and there is a parallel life as a television host. Time named her one of the hundred most influential people in the world in 2019.