Keke Palmer Took the High Road When Ryan Murphy Yelled At Her For Taking A Day Off

When I hear stories about famous people being jerks, I think of a John Mulaney joke. He talks about how when Mick Jagger hosted SNL he would respond to jokes, ideas, or costumes with a curt yet enthusiastic “Yes” or equally enthusiastic “No.” To Mulaney, Jagger wasn’t being rude, he was merely responding the way someone who hasn’t been told “no” in decades would respond. Some people can handle that level of attention and only let it get to their heads slightly (like Jagger, in Mulaney’s example). Others become real pricks.

I’m sure there is a middle ground, but we hear about the pricks more than anybody else. I also don’t buy into the adage that sometimes people have bad days, and that’s why they can sometimes be assholes. People have bad days (of course), but at a certain point, you have to learn whether or not to take that bad out on other people. If you work in the entertainment industry for long enough, you learn what kind of person you want to be. If you are someone who goes out of their way to cut people who work for you down to size, it’s a choice.

So, when I heard that Keke Palmer was “ripped” into by longtime creator and Producer Ryan Murphy, I didn’t walk away thinking, “Oh, he just had a bad day.” The Los Angeles Times reported that Palmer revealed the incident in her upcoming memoir. She recalled that while filming Scream Queens for Murphy, she had requested a day off due to a prior obligation. Palmer was called to set regardless but chose to attend to said prior obligation. Murphy did not care for that.

The man behind everything you love and hate about American Horror Story called Palmer on the phone and let her have it. “It was kind of like I was in the dean’s office. He was like, ‘I’ve never seen you behave like this. I can’t believe that you, out of all people, would do something like this.’” In Palmer’s mind, that was the end of the incident, even though someone on set tried to convince her otherwise. “I said, ‘Ryan talked to me and I guess he’s cool, it’s fine,’ and she was like, ‘It’s bad,’ trying to make me scared or something, which was a little irritating,” Palmer shared in her memoir Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative.

Regardless of how she thinks it went, she admits that it may have led to her not working with him again, but she doesn’t seem broken up. “I’m still not sure Ryan cared, or got it, and that’s okay because he was just centering his business, which isn’t a problem to me,” she explained. “But what I do know is even if he didn’t care, and even if I never work with him again, he knows that I, too, see myself as a business.”

It would be easy (and just) for Palmer to put Murphy on blast, but she doesn’t. Instead, she highlights the most important part of the story: herself. She doesn’t rip into him or take out her frustrations on him. She gives him much more respect than it seems he gave her.