Keke Palmer’s Whole Career Has Been Leading Up to Nope

Jordan Peele’s Nope is his biggest film yet, not only in terms of cinematic scope but also in narrative ambition. A large part of this is due to the growing complexity of his characters, especially Daniel Kaluuya’s OJ and especially Keke Palmer’s Emerald, a career peak for a woman who’s played many roles in her long career but has never gotten a chance to show all her skills in the same part. “Within my career, you do see me do a lot of different things,” Palmer told an interviewer recently, but Peele “found a way to access all the things that make me me in one role.” If you were in a Black home in the mid-aughts, Palmer was a constant presence on your TV screen: movies like Barbershop 2, Madea’s Family Reunion, and Akeelah and the Bee—her breakout role—played in constant rotation on BET. Keke’s career was consistent, but never moved into the upper echelon where our most highly regarded young actors like Timotheé Chalamet, Zendaya, or even her Nope co-star Daniel Kaluuya reside. By this point, she’s not just Keke Palmer, she’s Keke Keep-a-Job Palmer and Keke Keep-a-Check Palmer, our generation’s embodiment of “booked and busy.” She was a standout in the 2019 critically acclaimed stripper-revenge drama Hustlers, though her role was small.