Keke Palmer started her career with a project set in the fashion world, and she’s back to it in her new film I Love Boosters.
Palmer stars in Boots Riley‘s latest project, playing the ringleader for a group of shoplifters who go after a billionaire fashion designer (played by Demi Moore) by stealing her clothes and reselling them at a lower price. It comes almost 20 years after the star led the Nickelodeon series True Jackson, VP, about a teenager running a fashion company’s youth division.
“It’s so funny, it was reminding me of True Jackson, VP,” Palmer joked at the Los Angeles premiere on Wednesday. “The whole [Moore’s character] Christie Smith, she was not a nice Max Madigan OK, she was not!,” referencing True’s boss on the show.
She continued, “It’s always good to step into the fashion vibe; I love this [movie] because it really kind of exposes what we already know about fashion but just really putting the attention back on the culture; all these people that are setting the tone, yet somehow they’re being sold back their own reflection and it’s at a price that they can’t even buy but it’s literally them.”
Riley was inspired to tell the story after his days growing up in the Bay Area and “the life that I’ve had as a broke rapper trying to stay fly. I’ve had to know a lot of boosters in my life to try to maintain that.” He and Palmer also collaborated on an EP to go along with the movie, after his daughter Alina Kanin wrote a track that both wanted to include in the film.
“I’m like Boots in the same sense where I want to be creative in every medium that I can; if I could be a painter, I would paint something,” Palmer explained. “So the fact that I get to do a movie and then alongside the movie do music that goes with the movie, it’s like yeah! It’s just so fun, I want to put my all into it and create the world and allow people to meet the world at different vantage points.”
Poppy Liu, Taylour Paige, Eiza González, Boots Riley, LaKeith Stanfield, Kasmere Trice Stanfield, Keke Palmer and Naomi Ackie at the premiere.
Kevin Winter/Getty Images
And on screen, Palmer gushed about facing off against Moore, emphasizing, “I can’t tell you how many times I was up with my mom when she was crying to Ghost, so it’s kind of insane to be working with her.”
Riley teased he wanted Moore to play the film’s villain because “I thought that she might be crazy, and I like working with crazy people,” and Palmer said she was sure to bring her A-game to their scenes, as well as to “really also learn. I’m an observer, so watching her perform, watching the small changes that she would make in between each take, she’s a very subtle and nuanced actor.”
The film features a star-studded supporting cast of Taylour Paige,Naomi Ackie,Poppy Liu,Eiza González,LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter and Don Cheadle, as Liu joked that “people might be drawn in by the fashion but then j.k., you’re going to get radicalized, we hope!” with the narrative on capitalism and consumption that flows through the movie. She continued, “It’s definitely [about] people of the world unite, and also that the power of people connected to each other is so overwhelming and it’s the only way to overturn the oligarchy that we live in right now, this unity.”
I Love Boosters hits theaters May 22.