Keke Palmer recently welcomed her mother, Sharon, onto the “Baby, This Is Keke Palmer” podcast, where the two reminisced on “Quiet on Set” and Palmer’s own history as a child actor at Nickelodeon. Palmer starred in the lead role of the network’s “True Jackson, VP,” which ran for 56 episodes from 2008 to 2011. While the show was not created by Dan Schneider, who was accused of misconduct at Nickelodeon by several actors and writers in “Quiet on Set,” Sharon said she still felt his uncomfortable atmosphere whenever she was on the studio lot with her daughter.
“I honestly do remember you having a lot to say about the Dan Schneider sets,” Keke Palmer told her mother during the podcast. “I remember you feeling a way about Nickelodeon.”
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“My honest opinion is I thought the whole atmosphere of the Dan Schneider set was very weird, very cultish,” Sharon responded. “The parents were very secretive, and I honestly thought they all took themselves way too seriously.”
“I always looked at you being at Nickelodeon as being a stopping station,” Sharon continued, noting that Keke was already an established actor with a movie career under her belt when she made the jump to Nickelodeon star. “You didn’t get your start on Nickelodeon or Disney. You were blessed and fortunate enough to work in adult situations and kid situations. My mentality about the entertainment business wasn’t that Disney Channel or Nickelodeon was the end all to be all, but a lot of the parents did.”
Keke and Sharon also discussed Drake Bell, who was sexually abused by Nickelodeon acting coach Brian Peck when Bell was a teen actor at the network. Sharon said that she saw echoes of how Peck distanced Bell from his parents in order to take advantage of him in her own experience with Keke as a child star.
“When I saw the Drake story, it just broke my heart because I could see how his parents got trapped,” Sharon said.
“In my experiences with you in this industry, I had moments where people tried to push us away from each other or try to come in between us,” Keke added. “You never would allow that kind of thing to go down. It created tension in our relationship – I definitely felt overly controlled and confined and almost like I was in a prison sometimes. But when I look back, I feel like you were really just being protective of me.”
In the wake of “Quiet of Set” and the allegations against Schneider and Peck, many former Nickelodeon stars have called for greater parental supervision on sets. Ariana Grande, the pop star who featured on the Schneider-created hits “Victorious” and “Sam & Cat,” said on the “Podcrushed” podcast that “parents should allowed to be wherever they want to be” on sets where child actors are prominently featured.
Watch the full episode of “Baby, This Is Keke Palmer” in the video below.
