KeKe Palmer to star in ‘Insecure’ after jokingly asking Issa Rae for role
The "Akeelah and the Bee" star shot her shot. And scored.
KeKe Palmer’s dream of appearing on Insecure has come true!
“Hey @IssaRae there’s been a mix-up,” Palmer tweeted back in September 2020. “I posted about my excitement for season 5 of Insecure and now everyone thinks I’m gonna be on it. We can’t let them down, put me in to beat Condola’s ass real quick.”
“We can’t let them down,” she added, “put me in to beat Condola’s ass real quick,” Palmer said of Christina Elmore‘s character — who dated Issa’s ex Lawrence in Season 4.
Well, a full year later, this week the 28-year-old actress updated her fans with a screenshot of that old post along with an update that she landed a role on the highly anticipated fifth and final season of the HBO hit series.
“Careful what you wish for ?,” Palmer wrote on Instagram Wednesday. “Genuinely so thankful to @issarae! I always shoot my work shots (cause I loves to werk), what’s the worst that can happen? Present your skill, you never know how it can be of service.”
That same day, a new trailer for the upcoming season was released, showing Palmer’s character standing next to Condola, who is cradling a baby in her arms. The clip also teases Molly (Yvonne Orji) and Issa reconciling as friends as well as the return of Issa’s fling, fan-favorite Nathan (Kendrick Sampson).
“I’ve been wrapping my head around this since candidly, season 3,” Issa Rae, 36, told Entertainment Tonight back in March.
“But I’m so grateful to be able to play this character, who is obviously a version of me, and in the same way that I want this character to grow, I want to be able to grow too. So I think that’s what comes with it — I’ve played her for a long time, and I have so much more that I want to do,” she said.
The multi-hyphenate also shared that this major chapter of her life coming to an end has made her introspective.
“But being on set every day, I’m definitely taking it all in on a different level now, just in terms of, ‘Wow, I love this family. This is my family,'” she explained. “And we’ve done so much and these people are incredible, and I feel so blessed to work with them.”
“I know I’ll look back on this time very, very fondly, as I do now,” she said of her time on the series, which premiered in October 2016, and since then, has received critical acclaim and multiple Emmy nominations.
Co-star Orji also dished about the final episodes in an interview with ET. “You just have to watch and see, and see what relationships last and don’t. And sometimes with life, there’s some that don’t,” she shared.
“We go through a lot. We go through some generations,” Orji explained. “We go through 10 episodes, they all might not be an hour long, but you see an evolution. You are able to see the evolution of the characters, you’re able to hopefully get some answers. Y’all be wanting the answers, boy, and I hope y’all like the answers.”
The final season feels like “a chapter that ended,” said Orji, adding, “And you’re not looking at the book like, ‘What the heck was that?’”
The fifth season of Insecure is set to air on Oct. 24.
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