Keke Palmer Says She Gets Recognized Most for Viral “Sorry to This Man” Meme

Keke Palmer can still recall every word to a pivotal scene in Akeelah and the Bee, the 2006 film that put her on the map. Lip-synching the dialogue two decades later, Palmer tells Vanity Fair, “I love that little girl, you know? She was fighting for her life, okay?” Luckily, a young Palmer had costars Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne as mentors: “In so many ways, they were my first teachers in the industry.”

While walking down memory lane for Vanity Fair’s Scene Selection, Palmer reflected on her three seasons as star of the Nickelodeon series True Jackson, VP, from 2008 to 2011. “I grew up watching Disney, Nickelodeon, always being like, Wow, it would be so cool to do something like that. We all did. And it actually happened,” says Palmer. “Like, I was just gagged beyond belief.”

But headlining a TV show as a 15-year-old meant sacrificing parts of her childhood. “I had to grow up really fast,” says Palmer, “I had to not worry about having kid feelings because I was in a workplace doing a job. As a kid, you’re supposed to be able to be unreasonably angry, unreasonably sad, unreasonably whatever—because you’re a kid. But because there was so much at stake, I just couldn’t do it.”

When Palmer began to age out of adolescent roles, some opportunities dried up. “This is when people weren’t really referencing Akeelah and the Bee or True Jackson, VP, as much anymore,” Palmer recalls. “It was just a whole new world when I was an adult. Like everything I did as a kid kind of disappeared in a lot of ways.”

Her supporting turn as an exotic dancer alongside Jennifer Lopez in Hustlers (2019) proved to be Palmer’s “big reintroduction as an adult.” The actor’s star has continued to soar with roles in Jordan Peele’s sci-fi horror Nope (2022), alongside SZA in the buddy comedy One of Them Days (2025), and opposite Naomi Ackie in Boots Riley’s newly released I Love Boosters. But these days, Palmer is often stopped on the street not about a performance, but a viral 2019 meme—born from the time Palmer failed to identify George W. Bush–era vice president Dick Cheney during a Vanity Fair lie detector test, brushing it off with an unforgettable: “Sorry to this man.”

“‘Sorry to this Man’ was a movie, you know what I mean?” Palmer says with a laugh. “It was a very short one, but it really was a movie in so many ways. People still come up to me talking about that damn near more than anything in my catalogue of films.”

The now 32-year-old actor says she had no way of anticipating just how big her political gaffe would become. “My generation is a generation of memes,” says Palmer. “But we remember the time where that didn’t exist, so there was no way I could predict this type of media.”

Nevertheless, she welcomes the emerging artform as part of the larger tapestry of her career. “I really appreciate any opportunity to take a look at the past as I continue to trudge forward,” she says.