According to a recent interview that actress and singer Keke Palmer had with InStyle’s Ladies First with Laura Brown, the artist opened up about growing up as a child star and how her experiences in Hollywood have shaped her into the woman that she is today.
She shared that Hollywood execs did not prioritize her emotions while growing up as a child performer in the entertainment industry.
Palmer shared how, often, when children stars do not cater to the demands of the industry, they’re seen as hard to work with.
“At a young age in the child entertainer world, your emotions are always the last thing that people care about. I think you get really quickly into being a people-pleaser and trying to be everything that everybody wants you to be. And so I think in a lot of that, you end up being misunderstood. When you’re not always being agreeable, you’re a brat,” she said.
“It’s always been a bit of a thing for me because people have had all these expectations of who they want me to be at a very young age,” Palmer continued. “How they want me to act and how they want me to respond. I’ve fought a lot of that most of my adult life, and I’m still new into my adult life.”
The True Jackson VP actress also divulged how she struggled with feeling insecure in her music.
“I think I’ve always been able to be more objective about acting and all these other things because they kind of just came to me without me knowing. But music was something that at a young age I believed in myself in and throughout the industry got very challenged [doing].”
“I had to really come to that understanding that success is what you make it and what you design it to be. Everybody is not Beyoncé, and that’s alright. That doesn’t mean that you’re not amazing because if you’re not Beyoncé, maybe you are Norah Jones.”
Related Story: KeKe Palmer Inks Overall TV Deal with Entertainment One
Palmer’s mother, Sharon Palmer, told TODAY that she urged her daughter to be an actress so that she could afford secondary education.
“I did it so she could go to college. I never expected any of this. I didn’t do it for money or fame. It was college. I wanted her to go to college.”
“I wanted my kids to go to college, and I wanted them to have a better life.”
Hollywood stardom, indeed, comes with a price.
