Do you know Keke Palmer? Famous actor? Meme queen? Chart-topping artist? Glamour‘s July cover star? Of course you do. She’s Keke Palmer. But, actually, she’d prefer if you called her Lauren.
The 28-year-old, whose full name is Lauren Keyana Palmer, revealed during a round of Glamour‘s Excessive Questions that her stage name was in fact a family nickname, a shortened version of her middle name, Keyana.
After drawing a card reading, “Why do you prefer to go by Keke instead of Lauren?” Palmer answered: “This is a good question because I actually don’t prefer to go by Keke instead of Lauren.” (Oops.)
“The only people that called me Keke were people in my family,” she explains. “Then one day, my manager at that time heard my mom call me Keke because I wasn’t listening.” She mimicked her mother doing a very momlike hiss yell—“Keke!”—that all children and moms will recognize.
“He said, ‘That should be your stage name,’” she revealed. “So [Keke] went from being just something that my family called me, to being something that the whole world called me.”
“And more than anything,” she added, “I would love to go back to Lauren.”
