Keke Palmer, the movie star Hollywood keeps handing a microphone

Keke Palmer

Photo: Dominick D / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 26, 1993 Harvey, Illinois, United States
Occupation	Actress and television host
Known for	Nope, Ice Age: Continental Drift, Lightyear
Awards	2 Emmy · New York Film Critics Circle · NAACP Image

NBC has decided what Keke Palmer is. When the network named her the next host of The Voice, taking over the chair Carson Daly has held since the show began, it confirmed a version of her career that television has been writing for years: the quick, unflappable presence who can run a live room and turn a stumble into the best moment of the night. The film critics who watched her in Nope, One of Them Days and I Love Boosters have reached a different verdict. They see a leading actress whose comic timing hides how much dramatic control she brings to a scene. Palmer has never accepted that she must pick one, and her career records what that refusal has cost and bought.

She is Lauren Keyana Palmer on paper, and she has said she would rather be called Lauren; “Keke” comes from an imaginary friend her older sister Loreal invented before Keke was born. Her parents, Sharon and Larry Palmer, met in drama school and both worked as actors before settling into steadier jobs, he at a polyurethane company, where he still works alongside his role as a Catholic deacon, she as a high school teacher working with autistic children. She sang in church first, and at nine she auditioned for a stage production of The Lion King.

Palmer, who was born on August 26, 1993, in Harvey, Illinois, and grew up in nearby Robbins, got her first film part in Barbershop 2: Back in Business and signed a record deal with Atlantic a year later. The role that changed everything came in 2006, when she played the title character in Akeelah and the Bee, an 11-year-old from a poor neighbourhood fighting her way to the Scripps National Spelling Bee. The film earned her an NAACP Image Award and a Black Reel Award, and it set the template directors still hire her for: someone smarter than the room, deciding how much of it to show. The same year she had a supporting part in Tyler Perry‘s Madea’s Family Reunion; Disney Channel’s Jump In! and a debut album, So Uncool, followed in 2007.

Nickelodeon made her a fixture. In True Jackson, VP, which ran from 2008 to 2011, she played a teenager handed a vice-presidency at a fashion company, and she wrote and sang the theme song. At $20,000 an episode she was reported as the fourth-highest-paid child star on television. She voiced Aisha in the revival of Winx Club and the young mammoth Peaches in Ice Age: Continental Drift, a part she is about to pick up again.

The move into adult work was deliberate and fast. She played Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas in the VH1 film CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story, hosted her own BET talk show, Just Keke, as one of the youngest talk-show hosts in American television, and in September 2014 became the first African American woman to play the title role in Cinderella on Broadway, staying until the production closed in January 2015. Ryan Murphy cast her as Zayday Williams in Scream Queens; Fox’s Grease: Live gave her Marty Maraschino. Lorene Scafaria put her among the dancers of Hustlers, and ABC made her the third permanent co-host of Strahan, Sara and Keke, a show the pandemic ended in March 2020.

The prizes tell an awkward story, and it is the part of her career the highlight reel smooths over. Palmer’s two Primetime Emmys have both come from formats the industry treats as side projects. The first, in 2021, was for Turnt Up with the Taylors, a Facebook Watch comedy she co-created and in which she played every member of a reality-TV family. The second, in 2023, was for hosting NBC’s revival of Password, which made her the first Black woman to win the game show host category and the first woman to take it since Meredith Vieira in 2009. Her most serious film performance, Emerald Haywood, the hustling, talkative sister who refuses to be frightened off her family’s horse ranch in Jordan Peele‘s Nope, won the New York Film Critics Circle prize for supporting actress and no Oscar nomination. The Academy invited her to join its membership the following summer. Her films have earned glowing reviews and uneven returns: One of Them Days, the 2025 comedy she led with SZA, turned a $14 million budget into about $51.8 million and a sequel now in development at TriStar, while Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters, which drew some of the warmest reviews of its SXSW premiere this year, took in under $10 million against a $20 million budget. Each time a role proves the case for her as a lead, a hosting job arrives that pays better and reaches more people.

She has not slowed down to resolve it. In 2025 she played Zoe, the leader of the crew that ambushes Eddie Murphy and Pete Davidson‘s armoured truck in Tim Story’s The Pickup for Prime Video, and took a supporting part in Aziz Ansari’s Good Fortune. In February 2026 Peacock premiered The ‘Burbs, a series reworking of the Joe Dante comedy in which she plays Samira Fisher, a lawyer and new mother convinced her husband’s childhood neighbours are hiding something; she is also an executive producer, and the show was renewed for a second season in April. In I Love Boosters she is Corvette, an aspiring designer living in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant who leads a shoplifting crew against the fashion empire of Demi Moore‘s Christie Smith. Off screen she hosts the podcast Baby, This Is Keke Palmer, runs the online platform KeyTV and this year began mentoring students as an artist-in-residence at UCLA.

Her private life became public in a way she did not choose. She announced her pregnancy while hosting Saturday Night Live in December 2022, and her son was born in February 2023. She and his father, Darius Jackson, separated that October; in November she obtained a temporary restraining order and temporary sole custody, alleging domestic violence, before dropping the requests in May 2024.

The next year will put both versions of her in front of the largest audiences she has had. Ice Age: Boiling Point brings back Peaches on February 5, 2027; the Spaceballs sequel from Amazon MGM, directed by Josh Greenbaum, with Mel Brooks and Rick Moranis returning, is set for April 23, 2027; and the celebrity edition of The Voice will make her the face of one of NBC’s biggest franchises. Whether Hollywood ends up remembering her as the host who could act or the actress who could host may depend on what she chooses to make once the second season of The ‘Burbs and the One of Them Days sequel are done.