Keke Palmer is opening up about her time on Ryan Murphy’s Scream Queens. In an excerpt of her upcoming memoir Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative, Palmer recalled the time a white castmate she refers to as “Brenda” made a racist remark to her on set, per the Los Angeles Times. The campy show, which premiered in 2015, is a gory Murphy classic, following the members of a top sorority as a serial killer wreaks havoc on campus. Later canceled in 2016, the anthology starred Emma Roberts, Ariana Grande, Billie Lourd, Abigail Breslin, and Lea Michele, alongside Palmer.
In the book, due out next week from Macmillan, Palmer writes that so-called “Brenda” was upset over a tiff she’d gotten into with another castmate. When Palmer tried to calm the woman down by suggesting everyone “have fun and respect each other,” Palmer says Brenda responded, “Keke, literally, just don’t. Who do you think you are? Martin fucking Luther King?”
“It was such a weighted thing that she said, but I didn’t allow that weight to be projected on me, because I know who I am,” Palmer told the Times, adding that she chose to anonymize the story to decenter Brenda. “I’m not no victim. That’s not my storyline, sweetie. I don’t care what her ass said. If I allow what she said to cripple me, then she would.”
According to the Times, Palmer also wrote that Murphy once “ripped” into her and called her unprofessional over a production issue on the show. As Palmer remembers it, she had committed to a different gig on one of her days off from shooting Scream Queens. When production tried to call her to set last minute, she says she dug her heels in and fulfilled her prior obligation. Murphy then called her directly to express his disappointment.
“It was kind of like I was in the dean’s office,” she told the Times of the interaction. “He was like, ‘I’ve never seen you behave like this. I can’t believe that you, out of all people, would do something like this.’”
“I’m still not sure Ryan cared, or got it, and that’s okay because he was just centering his business, which isn’t a problem to me,” Palmer writes in her memoir. “But what I do know is even if he didn’t care, and even if I never work with him again, he knows that I, too, see myself as a business.”
The Cut has reached out to Murphy for comment and will update this post if we hear back.
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