Keke Palmer on I Love Boosters and Surviving Nickelodeon Child Stardom

Keke Palmer harbors a touch of jealousy toward her 3-year-old son.

Leodis Jackson leads a charmed little life. He spent a chunk of last fall in Australia, following his mom around the set of “Spaceballs 2.” At Leodis’ birthday party last month, Raven-Symoné and Vic Mensa were among the high-profile attendees getting their faces painted and jumping in the bounce house. And while other toddlers dress up as Minions or the superhero du jour every Halloween, Leo opts for something more cultured: He was the Bow Wow to Palmer’s Snoop Dogg for their annual photo shoot in 2025, and their costumes the previous two years referenced “The Bride of Frankenstein” and “Game of Thrones.”

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Palmer, 32, wasn’t born into that kind of life. “As the baby gets older, you start seeing how the baby is living, and then you start being like, ‘Why don’t I live like that?’” she says, beginning to cackle before she can finish the thought.

But she isn’t really talking about the glitz and glam Leo gets to grow up with. It’s the warmth, care and simplicity in his life that Palmer wants for herself.

“You start seeing how you’re loving the baby, and then you’re like, ‘I’m not loving myself right,’” Palmer says. “Because the way that this baby is being loved, and the way I see the baby responding to that love, suddenly I realize not just what I lacked, but what I’m responsible to give myself.” She doesn’t mean to criticize how her parents raised her: “I’m not a baby, so I can’t go back to Sharon and Larry and say, ‘Why didn’t you — ?’ That would be childish as hell. So I have to now say, ‘Well, whatever it was that I needed and didn’t get that I have the capacity to offer my son, I’m responsible to do it for me too,’” she says — speaking like the recovered child star she is.

As an adult, Palmer has begun looking for ways to use her career as a tool for societal progress. With breakout roles in the 2006 film “Akeelah and the Bee” and the 2008-11 Nickelodeon sitcom “True Jackson, VP,” she grew up during a time when celebrities spoke out against the Iraq war and stuck it to George W. Bush. But by the time Palmer was an adult, the feel-good Obama years made it socially acceptable not to wade into politics other than to say “Yes We Can.” Another decade and two Trump inaugurations later, though, it’s impossible to ignore that the world is burning. Not even a former child star can afford to stay on the ideological sidelines.

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Enter Boots Riley. This year’s SXSW will open with the world premiere of “I Love Boosters,” the eccentric communist’s new sci-fi comedy, which Palmer leads in a role unlike any she’s had before. Produced and distributed by rising indie superpower Neon — with a wide release set for May 22 — it’s the follow-up to Riley’s satirical directorial debut, “Sorry to Bother You.” The film was an unexpected sensation in 2018, an “Animal Farm”-influenced nightmare with a grotesque finale: Audiences didn’t know whether to cover their eyes or laugh out loud at the shredding of LaKeith Stanfield’s body as he transformed into a human-horse hybrid and led a mob into the home of an evil CEO (Armie Hammer). The absurdist sequence was wildly unsubtle, but that’s been Riley’s style since the ’90s, when he co-founded the political hip-hop group the Coup; this is a man, after all, who told Variety during the Hollywood strikes in 2023, “I believe that people should democratically control the wealth that we create with our labor. There needs to be a mass, militant, radical labor movement that turns more radical as it goes on, until the people actually take over the places that they work and change the nature of society.”

In that vein, “I Love Boosters” stars Palmer as Corvette, an aspiring fashion designer in Oakland who’s too broke to pursue her passion. Alongside two of her friends (Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige), she spends her days “boosting” — shoplifting goods and reselling them at low prices — from a chain of designer retail stores lorded over by cruel, glamorous billionaire Christie Smith (Demi Moore), whose creative genius Corvette secretly admires. But she’s a hard-ass about her politics, and the film sees her and her fellow boosters pursue extreme measures to claw themselves and their working-class comrades out of poverty and exploitation.

Between the ICE raids, the Epstein files and the skyrocketing costs of staying alive, Palmer has felt paralyzed by the headlines lately. “It puts you in a position of ‘I just want to survive. I want to hold my son. I want to get out of here,’” she says. “But I also know my life is different.” She’s wary of falling into despair when she knows she has protection in the wealth she’s built. “Some people in the entertainment industry are just in it for the money and the fame, and that’s part of the problem,” Palmer says. Hoping to set a better example, she joined “I Love Boosters.”

The script felt to Palmer like an optimistic take on “Set It Off,” the 1996 action film about a Jada Pinkett Smith-led ensemble of bank robbers. “It’s empowering. These are women fighting against the system in this vigilante way,” Palmer says. “But it ends terribly. They lose their lives, and no progress is made. To me, ‘I Love Boosters’ is a way to take elements of that, but put it in a way that I think we need and we deserve: ‘Let’s find a different way to look at this.’ We can’t guarantee that things are going to change, but it’s so important to have a sense of hope. Not false hope, not tying everything up with a bow, but we have to at least have a tone of how we can move forward.”

“This goes out to all them hardworking women / Who risk jail time just to make them a living / We know there’d probably be no one in prison / If rights to food, clothes and shelter were given / Plus, they be giving me dress so fresh / Even when my wallet yells, ‘SOS.’”

Boots Riley rapped these words in the Coup’s 2006 track “I Love Boosters!,” on which he later based his film. “The stories I told in that song happened in the early ’90s,” he says, recalling the fashion he saw in his Oakland community. Though his neighbors were living paycheck to paycheck, they were often decked in designer clothing because they did their shopping with people like Corvette. “Folks who bought from boosters were actually setting the trends. Styles from Black neighborhoods ended up being part of the marketing for these brands,” Riley continues. “So I was thinking about that, but I was also thinking about the idea of creativity under a system where survival isn’t guaranteed. Survival isn’t only just food and shelter. Survival is being able to help create the world around us.”

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“He’s so cool and quirky, but down-to-earth, but also very auteur, but also very accessible,” Palmer says about Riley. “He’s from the Bay, to put it plainly.” When the two first met over lunch in Los Angeles, they discussed “I Love Boosters” and its anti-capitalist politics for more than three hours.

Making a film with a director so unabashed about his leftism was a new but grounding experience for Palmer. “Everybody that worked on the movie had the same politics, in terms of what we believe,” she says — though she stops short of calling herself a communist. “Maybe not all the same approaches, but we’re all artists. We believe in democracy and people being owed freedoms, even though we don’t get them because of systems we were born into.

“Some of these things may not change in our lifetime — capitalism, racism, feeling isolated, unseen. There’s a maturation that happens with this character that I directly connect to: Maybe there’s no moment where this comes to a climax and the problems are solved. So now what do I do? How do I manage?”

Corvette is steadfast in her militance against Smith’s exploitation, which her friend Sade (Ackie) grows tired of, worried their protests will interfere with her ability to put food on the table. “In order to be down with the people, you gotta be willing to bleed — but it’s like, ‘We can’t keep bleeding, y’all!’” Palmer says. “Because the people you keep asking to bleed are already dying. How many times can we keep asking people to lose their lives, and then nothing changes?”

In real life, Palmer seems to identify more closely with Sade than her own character — committed to the cause in theory, but with a tendency to prioritize bodily safety over radical action in practice. “I’m always going to be that person that wants to fight with the people, but I’m also the person now, at 32, that wants people to live,” Palmer says. “I don’t want people to lose their lives, especially because the people usually losing their lives are the ones that are fighting to keep their lives.”

Though Corvette’s aim is to start a revolution by any means necessary, Riley drew from Palmer’s more trepidatious nature while directing her. “I’ve been knowing about Keke since ‘Akeelah and the Bee,’ even ‘Barbershop’ and all that stuff,” Riley says, referencing her 2004 film debut, when she was just 10 years old. In their conversations, though, Riley realized he was getting a version of Palmer that the world hadn’t seen much of throughout her 20-year career.

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“When I was first talking to Keke, I saw that some of her natural cadences weren’t always used in films,” Riley says. “She’s a comedic genius. However, there’s a lot of ways to get to that comedic genius.” Intentionally and unintentionally, Palmer has produced countless memes over the years; she made the words “Sorry to this man” iconic in an 2019 interview when she failed to identify Dick Cheney in a photograph. She has become known for exaggerated facial expressions and exclamations both as an actor and through her internet presence, coining catchphrases wherever she goes. But in person, she made Riley laugh without any of that.

When Riley told Palmer he wanted to see her gentle naturalism on-screen, she wasn’t sure how to take it. “She said to me, ‘Look. Everybody always says they want to do this with me, but then when we make it on set, they want that cadence that guarantees a certain kind of comedy,’” Riley remembers. “I was like, ‘That’s not what I want to do. To me, being more real makes the funny parts funnier and the sad parts sadder. I guess when people hire Keke Palmer, they want a specific thing. She hasn’t been able to show these other aspects of herself.”

That isn’t to say “I Love Boosters” suffers from a lack of outlandish humor; it’s certainly a cousin to “Sorry to Bother You.” The new film employs plenty of its own zany imagery and physical comedy. “There’s some Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton in the movie, and to people who haven’t seen the movie, that sounds like the antithesis of the naturalistic thing we’re talking about,” Riley says. “But it’s because of Keke that we’re able to walk that line. She’s very quick on her feet.”

Palmer’s co-stars feel the same way. “The giggling that we did was insane,” says Paige, who was pregnant while shooting “I Love Boosters.” “Towards the end, we were laughing with [co-star] Will Poulter, and I literally peed on myself. Straight up. Baby was pushing on just the right area, and we were laughing so much that I was like, ‘You guys, stop. I’m going to pee.’ I actually did. Like, I had to go home.”

Viewers got their first taste of this more understated version of Palmer’s comedy in the Issa Rae-produced 2025 buddy comedy “One of Them Days.” The film, which came out a few months after “I Love Boosters” was shot, follows two roommates desperately trying to recover their stolen rent money in a matter of hours, with Palmer starring as a hardworking pessimist opposite the reckless dreamer played by SZA. The Sony Pictures release was a runaway hit at the box office, making $51.8 million on a $14 million budget and a minimal marketing spend; naturally, a sequel is in development. It was a post-pandemic success akin to Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” in that it got Hollywood hopeful again about the viability of the theatrical business.

Palmer also saw box office success with her first leading role in a major studio release, starring in Jordan Peele’s “Nope” in 2022. Between that film, “One of Them Days” and now “I Love Boosters,” Palmer has spent the past four years proving her merits as a leading lady — both with her acting chops and with her potential to help guide the entertainment industry into the future.

“She had a massive hit last year, and it was one of the best times I’ve had at the theater with my family in recent memory,” says Neon co-founder and CEO Tom Quinn about Palmer’s big win with “One of Them Days.” Quinn’s team had been pursuing Riley for his second film since losing the bidding war for “Sorry to Bother You” to Annapurna at Sundance in 2018, just a year after Neon was founded. “We had another meeting with Boots and talked about this, but you never know where you’ll ultimately end up. None of the cast was attached at that point. We could have never imagined that we would be making a movie with Keke Palmer.”

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Quinn is hesitant to declare his expectations about how “I Love Boosters” will be received. But it seems that Neon hopes to use SXSW the way A24 did for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” both as an awards launchpad and because a film with such countercultural politics and imagery will find no warmer welcome than with the famously raucous, genre-loving crowds in Austin. “We have high ambition. I think it’s going to be a film that plays throughout the year, not just in its first window this summer,” Quinn says. With a budget of roughly $20 million, “I Love Boosters” is the most expensive film Neon has ever made, and its biggest swing as a company. Though the distributor has won Oscars for best picture twice with “Parasite” and “Anora,” those weren’t homegrown productions; Neon came on board after they finished filming. But Quinn realized, watching Riley’s vision mediated through Palmer’s performance while visiting the set, that “I Love Boosters” could change Neon’s trajectory as a studio. “On this movie specifically,” he says, “it felt that we were living up to the mission we represent: a safe harbor for filmmakers who have a very clear point of view.”

Years before she played a booster, Palmer was a hustler.

“I come from a small suburb in Illinois that is a food desert. Being an artist became a way out for my family,” she says. Her early success made her the breadwinner for her parents and siblings when she was still a tween, which was both a relief and an otherworldly burden. “Being a kid entertainer on networks such as Disney and Nickelodeon, there’s no machinery more dehumanizing than that, and I say ‘dehumanizing’ completely without sadness,” she says. “It’s just — you’re a product.”

“Once you see the difference between poverty and not poverty, you’re not going to go back. Even if you’re tired,” she continues. “And once you know you have the capacity, you just keep on taking on shit.” That remained true even as Palmer got older and built enough wealth to rest assured that her loved ones wouldn’t ever struggle again. Until she neared her 30s, she almost never took breaks: “And I realized in the last couple of years what that meant and what it cost me.”

That existential exhaustion comes through in Palmer’s other current project, Peacock’s remake of “The ’Burbs,” which reimagines the 1989 movie as a cozy mystery series starring Palmer and Jack Whitehall as Samira and Rob, a married couple who informally investigate an unsolved local murder.

The project, Palmer says with a smile, marked her first time playing a mother since becoming one herself. She relished “dealing with the themes of horror and comedy as it pertains to motherhood and who you’re with. It can go left real fast after you have that baby. You don’t even know who the hell you had it with.” She’s talking about her character’s fear that her husband may be involved with the murder — though it’s also an allusion to her own relationship history. (Palmer previously filed a restraining order against her ex-boyfriend Darius Jackson, who is Leodis’ father, after alleging he physically and verbally abused her; they’re now peaceful co-parents.) Pivoting back to the paranoia that comes with having a baby, she adds, “Any mom, I’m sure, can relate. Shit gets weird real fast.”

Boots Riley on the set of “I Love Boosters”

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As in “I Love Boosters,” Palmer’s character in “The ’Burbs” is torn up by the unfairness and inequity inflicted on her community by forces like unchecked wealth and policing. “The characters I’ve played are on these existential journeys of: What is value to me?” Palmer says. “How does value show up in this world that already tells me that I’m not of value — being a woman, being Black? What’s important to me is that at the end of my projects, there’s never a perfect ending. Because that’s what I’ve had to learn. When I turned 30, I realized that there is no destination.” Notably, Palmer’s 30th birthday came soon after the birth of her son.

On the set of “I Love Boosters,” a pregnant Paige watched Palmer wrestle with those big sociopolitical questions in character and while tending to Leo between takes. “I saw her grace. I saw days of exhaustion, but still, attentiveness and joy. I saw her maturity,” Paige says. “You want him to have his best days, but then you also want him to see you living your dreams and know he can do anything. Like, ‘It’s all for you, son.’ And she was telling me how much it changes you, and how much better her life got.”

As Palmer says, there are no perfect endings. She’ll never reach one neat destination. But she’s finally hit pause on the nonstop grinding of her youth. “Before my son, I would think about life in terms of outcomes,” she says. “I always felt like, because I lived with integrity, I was going to get something for it — like that anybody cared that I was a good person.”

But Palmer no longer feels like a product designed to meet other people’s needs. The stage of her life and career that led her to “I Love Boosters” is motivated by something bigger than the box she grew up in.

“I’m gonna do what feels right and what feels in alignment with me, as opposed to what I think I’m supposed to do,” she says. “That, to me, is what having integrity and true faith is.”

Styling: Jason Rembert; Fashion Assistant: Wilton White; Makeup: Renee Sanganoo/The Only Agency; Hair: Ann Jones; Look 1 (cover): Hat: Sarah Sokol Millinery: Necklace: Chopard; Look 2 (Red Dress): Dress: Carolina Herrera; Shoes: Jimmy Choo; Earrings and ring: Van Cleef & Arpels; Bracelets: Cartier; Look 3 (Sequin Jacket): Full Look: Thom Browne; Earrings: Wempe; Look 4 (Long Dress with Hood): Dress: Gabriella Hearst; Shoes; Paul Andrew; Necklace: Van Cleef & Arpels; Bracelets: Cartier; Look 5 (Gold Top): Top and Skirt: Versace; Shoes: Paul Andrew; Earrings and necklace: Mikimoto; Ring: Boucheron; Bracelets: Cartier