In today’s cover story segment of the “Daily Variety” podcast, Variety’s Selome Haile breaks down the profile of Kiki Palmer, the star of the Boots Riley comedy “I Love Boosters,” which opens the SXSW festival next week. Palmer tells Heil how the birth of her son three years ago changed the way she thinks about the world and the role she plays.
Interviewing Palmer at the Variety offices in New York, Heil found the 32-year-old actor, who broke out as a preteen in 2006’s “Akeela and the Bees,” to be introspective and quick to laugh.
“What Keke said to me didn’t make it into the story, but it influenced the way I wrote this story and thought about her career during that time. She joked that lately it feels like every sentence starts with ‘Since my son was born.'” “She gave birth to her son just before 2016, and she’s definitely at a point in her life where she’s reorganizing her whole life and thinking about who she is as a person and as an entertainer, what her career means in the world, and what she can do with it,” Heil says.
“I work with someone like[writer and director]Boots Riley, who’s been a counterculture artist for decades. He’s a self-proclaimed communist, and he’s very proud of that title. He’s been a political hip-hop musician since the 1990s. So she talked to me a lot about how she processes her upbringing in the industry, as someone who has been acting since a very young age, and also becoming a mother and having to think very critically about what kind of world you are in. “She wants her son to live, and she wants the world she wants to live in. And because of the kind of headlines we’ve been seeing lately, she’s in a position to really start thinking: How can she use her celebrity status and her work as an artist to put out work and ideas that she wants people to think about and talk about?” Heil says.
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