Yahoo News Keke Palmer on Why She Made Her Pregnancy Announcement on ‘SNL’: “That’s Something My Kid Can Have Forever”
Keke Palmer says her decision to reveal her pregnancy while hosting Saturday Night Live was based in part on not knowing how else to address the private news publicly.
The Nope actress opened up to Vanity Fair about the much-talked-about motherhood announcement, which went viral after she confirmed her pregnancy while hosting the NBC sketch show on Dec. 3. Palmer said that because people were already noticing the physical changes in her body and “commenting on it,” she felt like she needed to address it, but she hadn’t quite figured it out until then.
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“I knew it was going to be a thing to try and hide it — people were already commenting on it,” she said. “I didn’t really know how to address it. It just felt like it was never the right time and having a child is so private.”
Palmer added that she ultimately felt she should “let people know,” and with the highly visible hosting gig right there, it seemed like a good time to make her announcement a special moment and lean into the show’s comedic nature. “You need a certain level of physicality to do SNL,” she said. “It was so much fun to say it during my monologue. That’s something my kid can have forever.”
The actress left her mark at SNL during her December appearance, directly addressing the online rumors around her pregnancy in her opening monologue. “People have been in my comments, saying, ‘Keke’s having a baby,’ ‘Keke’s pregnant,’ and I want to set the record straight,” the actress and former Good Morning America host said at the time. “I am!”
During the show opener, Palmer told the crowd she had been intentionally trying to “keep it on the down-low ’cause I got a lot of stuff going on,” before jokingly adding that one of those things was “a liquor sponsorship on the line.'”
Among that growing list of “stuff” for Palmer, who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter for its November 2022 cover story, is the launch of her new digital platform KeyTV. She was also recently announced to star opposite Sacha Baron Cohen in David O. Russell’s next movie Super Toys.
The multi-hyphenate, who said she was “blessed” following her baby news, also took the time to address how some fans who had watched Palmer grow up on the screen, might “feel a little weird about me having a baby.”
“I just wanna say, look, I’m 29. I’m grown. OK, I have sex. I own a home,” Palmer said before joking, “I stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.”
