Keke Palmer Revealed at Teen Vogue Summit That She Improvised Part of This Iconic “Nope” Scene

Actress Keke Palmer — who often goes viral for her funny reactions and things like introducing Megan Thee Stallion at the Met Gala and not recognizing former Vice President Dick Cheney — knows the power of flexibility and surprise when it comes to great showmanship. And those are the qualities she brought to one of her most compelling roles yet: Emerald Haywood in Jordan Peele’s Nope. Did you know she improvised a fair bit of the character who took over our screens last summer?

At Teen Vogue Summit 2022, Keke talked to editor-in-chief Versha Sharma about the process of bringing Emerald to life, in collaboration with Peele. Peele, whose movies showcase a very particular and intentional point of view, gave the actress license to allow that level of fluidity into her character.

“There’s a script, and the script is like your guideline. And the character’s not going to change just because you say that one little thing,” she said during her keynote. “But [Peele] definitely encouraged me to improv. Like in the scene where Emerald has that big monologue in the beginning where she’s talking about the Haywood history. We did that so many times that by the end, I was like, Maybe I can add some ad libs to it, and he’ll be cool with it. So I started doing the whole singing on the side. And he encouraged it, he loved it! So I just kept going with it.”

It’s clear that Keke is at her best without the prescriptions of rigidity and hard lines. Her ability to captivate viewers comes directly from an understanding that playing a character comes from a place of exploration. “I can have an idea and I can start something, but if it turns into something else, I should lean into that,” she said. “Then it may become something even better.”

The actress also described the kind of involvement she had with her character’s look ahead of shooting, as well as the direction Peele had in mind. He’d asked her to send him photos of how she thought Emerald Haywood might look and present herself. “The number one thing that he knew was that he knew he wanted Emerald to have my ‘fro. Like he was searching on my Instagram page and he said, ‘This is Emerald right here.’ [I was like,] ‘I’m so glad that this is the look that you chose [for me] to wear on the main stage and represent my natural hair in this way, honey!”

During her panel at the Teen Vogue Summit, Keke also got into her on-set interactions with her Nope co-star Daniel Kaluuya and how he got into his character. She described the actor as having “a little bit of a method vibe” without subscribing entirely to the method acting technique. “He has to not do his British accent [when playing an American role],” she says. “From the moment that we met and he was starting to do the movie, he was already talking in an American accent. So that already kind of changes your personality. British jokes and American jokes are totally different, so the nuances of his personality don’t come through until you hear his actual accent.”