Keke Palmer is able to use the “lessons” of her early fame in her relationships today.
The 30-year-old actor — whose real name is Lauren Keyana Palmer — moved from her hometown in Harvey, Illinois to Hollywood with her parents and sisters in the late 2000s so she could start her career and even though she found things to be “confusing” at that time, she is now able to “understand” others better.
“I think that a lot of the lessons that I learned in terms of how to deal with life at that confusing time are skills that I’m able to use to this day in every relationship,” Palmer told “Entertainment Tonight.”
“Seeing things from other people’s perspective from those early years of becoming ‘Keke Palmer,’ seeing the way it shifted the dynamic in [our] family, that helped me to learn how to understand people better,” she said.
“It was very much, ‘So OK, this is Keke and we doing everything for Keke and everything Keke,’ but really the Keke Palmer brand is something that has helped propel us all in different areas so, like, that’s great,” she continued.
Palmer has sisters Loreal, 34, as well as 23-year-old Lawrencia, and her older sister insisted during the joint interview that she was “never jealous” of her sibling amid her sudden rise to fame.
“I talk about how [when] people find out we’re sisters they’re always like, ‘Were you ever jealous?’ and it’s like, no, I was never jealous in the sense that they’re thinking. It was more so like, ‘What is my acting? What is my entertaining? Like, why can’t I find my thing?” Loreal said.
“I was literally just telling someone the other day, ‘She’s just a born entertainer. She could be paid pennies and she would still do this because she’s done this her whole life,” the older sister said.
However, the Nope actress — who has son Leo with ex-partner Darius Jackson — admitted that it took her “a lot of years” to get through those early days of her Nickelodeon stardom because she felt “responsible” for her whole family.
“But it still seems so one-person focused, and it took me a lot of years to get through some of that with myself, with feeling responsible for everyone. So when I hear your telling of it, it really is like, wow, that’s just a narrative that I’ve been telling myself … and then you’re telling yourself a whole ‘nother narrative and we both just killing ourselves with our narratives,” Palmer said.
