Bet You Didn’t Know: Secrets Behind The Making of “Akeelah and the Bee”
Finding Keke Palmer
Once Laurence was cast, the team went out to find the child who would play the title character. the director, Doug Atchison, said finding Akeelah was a huge weight on his shoulders. He and the casting crew auditioned 300 children in LA and NY looking for his star. When Keke Palmer auditioned the first time, Atchison noticed that Keke did something none of the other kids had done before her. He explains in an interview with Radio Free
“We started every kid doing the speech that’s on Larabee’s wall. We had every kid do that first. We eliminated half of them just on the basis of that. And when you see the same thing done over and over and over again–and I sat in on most of those auditions–little variations stand out. And Keke–and it sounds small, but it was a big deal–was the only one that moved her eyes back and forth like she was actually reading something for the first time on the wall. And it struck me that this kid is very good at being real, in the moment.”
But one audition wasn’t all it took though. The producers brought Keke in four more times before she was finally offered the role. In her last audition, she sat down and Atchison interviewed her, seeing if she really had a good grasp on the film’s message.
“And what really clinched it for me is when I interviewed her. Her fifth audition. She came in with her mom and we did like a 20 minute interview. And I asked her questions about the script. She was only ten at the time, but her level of analysis of the script, which she only read once according to her, was deeper than some adults. I would ask her “Why does Dr. Larabee stop teaching her?” And she’d say, “Oh, he’s starting to get too attached and she’s reminding him too much of his daughter, and that’s freaking him out, and he doesn’t want to go there with those feelings. He needs some space at that point.” And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s right. Could you explain that to some of the studio people that question me about that scene?” [laughs] So I realized that in Keke, I had found somebody…I didn’t want to have to painstakingly extract a performance from a kid line by line, but somebody who I could collaborate on as an actor and a director, and not just a child, even though she was a child. She wasn’t overly precocious like a lot of these kids.”
