Keke Palmer revealed a former manager convinced her that her mom would die if she didn’t lose weight.
The beloved actress, 31, reflected on her early career during a recent interview with The Cut, admitting it was difficult being her family’s breadwinner at such a young age.
“There was so much pressure to rise to the occasion for my community, for my parents, for my siblings, for their sacrifices,” she said in the profile published Tuesday.
“They weren’t saying it, but that was the reality. Because I’m the one that we all came here for.”
When Palmer was 12, one of her managers took advantage of her stress and vulnerability, telling her that her mom’s health would decline if she didn’t stay thin and continue to provide.
“That really, really traumatized me and stressed me out,” she told the outlet. “It got me thinking she was going to die, thinking about things like medical bills. It was just too much.”
Palmer’s mom, Sharon, has been her manager ever since.
The “Nope” star is the daughter of two amateur actors and grew up in a working-class home in the suburbs of Chicago.
She landed her on-screen debut in “Barbershop 2: Back in Business” when she was 10 years old. She struck gold less than two years later when she was given the lead in “Akeelah and the Bee.”
While her parents pushed her career forward, Palmer said they “were very cautious about the roles [she] played as a young Black child.”
A few years later, she reached full child-star status after being cast as the titular character in Nickelodeon’s “True Jackson, VP.”
The actress said her role as the 15-year-old executive struck home.
“She was climbing a corporate ladder, working a grown-up job as a kid. I felt the same way,” she told the outlet.
“She was making it happen for herself independently in the world,” Palmer continued. “Growing up with that character — it bled over into how I wanted to show up, how I want to deal with life.”
However, the “Scream Queens” star ran into another ugly side of Hollywood stardom while filming the sitcom.
In October 2024, Palmer told People she found herself in an “inappropriate” realtionship with an older man at 15.
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“I was trying to balance between being really young, but also feeling quite mature,” the “Password” host explained.
“Obviously I shouldn’t have been 15 dating no 20-year-old, but in my mind it was like ‘I got a full-time job … Can’t nobody understand me but a grown man.”
While Palmer didn’t realize their relationship was inappropriate at the time, she said he should have.
“I wasn’t mentally able to process and understand things that would’ve made that relationship appropriate,” she said.
“But he knew there was a lot of stuff that there’s no damn way for me to understand at damn 15,” she added.
The “One of Them Days” actress kept their relationship hidden for five years before ending things at 20.
In her memoir, “Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative,” the actress said the “power dynamic” between her and the older man “harmed” her in more ways than one.
