January 14, 2025

Photo: Justin French

When Keke Palmer’s trying to think of the name of a famous person, she doesn’t list what roles they’ve played or what projects they’ve been in, as most people do. We’re sitting at Le Crocodile on a frigid Sunday morning in December, and as she’s Googling whether the buckwheat pancakes are gluten-free (they aren’t), I happen to mention a certain Bravo reality-TV show. “Oh, yeah, I’ve seen a few episodes of that,” she says. “Is that with the older lady who’s like —” At which point she squints, pouts her lips, and screws her features up into a steely gaze, a precise conjuring of Lisa Vanderpump in her season-ten Vanderpump Rules cast photo.

Palmer does this a few times during our conversation: when she’s talking about Trisha Paytas (“She’s that white lady, right? Is she not white?,” she asks, imitating Paytas’s trademark pout. “What’s the history of her?”), about her former costar Angela Bassett in The Jacksons: An American Dream (she performed her impression in front of her a few years ago for Vanity Fair, to Bassett’s delight: “That’s probably my best one,” Palmer says), and about Ariana Grande (the week before, Palmer went viral for impersonating Grande introducing Patti Labelle at Grande’s 16th-birthday party: “I remember thinking, like, bitch, what is Patti Labelle doing here?”). Grande, of course, constantly generates headlines for her dead-on impressions, but Palmer might be an equally adept mimic. She has a preternatural gift for capturing someone’s facial expression to convey their general vibe, like a vaudeville comedienne or a caricaturist at a corporate event.

Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Getty Images

By Madame Clairevoyant

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A biweekly newsletter interrogating modern family life, written by Kathryn Jezer-Morton.