When Keke Palmer felt the hardships of being a child actress, Will Smith was there to lend a helping hand.

The One of Them Days star, now 31, was a guest on the latest episode of podcast The Toast and recalled Smith advising her to stick close to her family despite the hardships she was facing as the breadwinner. Around the 1-hour mark of the episode, Palmer explained that she was 17 years old when she had decided that she was “done” with her parents and contacted her attorney to undergo the emancipation process. The emancipation of minors, generally allotted to those between 14 to 17 depending on the state, legally ends parental authority before a child reaches age 18.

“I said, ‘Look here, my parents, they're done. I'm ready to be emancipated […] I'm done with them, they're gone, out of here,” Palmer jokingly shared, recalling the conversation with her attorney. “And he was like, ‘Keke, there are other ways to deal. You don't have to do it this way, you know. Maybe your parents and you just need to do therapy. There are other things that can happen, like, you don't need to go this route.”

Palmer added that while emancipation would be financially beneficial to her attorney, he “urged” her to “not run away” from the reality of being the first person in her family with “financial overflow and freedom.”

Weeks after the conversation, Palmer was on the set of the Nickelodeon sitcom True Jackson, VP, when she got a surprising call from another entertainer who reached stardom in his youth. 

“I get a call from this really, really obscure number,” Palmer said. “And I'm like, ‘What? I’m scared. This is weird, I'm not answering this.’ I go work I come back and I see there's a voicemail left from the same number.”

Palmer then reenacted the voicemail, trying her best to replicate Smith’s tone. 

“Hey, Keke. It's Will. We're over here doing Karate Kid with Jaden [Smith], and I just want to let you know that I talked to Ken [her lawyer]” Palmer recalled. “He let me know everything you're going through, and I want you to know sometimes it's hard being the first, but you'll get through.”

“Just keep staying focused, love on your family, and y'all gonna be good.” 

Palmer called the voicemail “so insane,” and was initially surprised that the call was coming from a “Hong Kong number.” Palmer credited Smith’s nudge as part of the reason that she decided not to move forward with emancipation.

“It's something that happens when you're stepping out, and you could be a child entertainer, or you could be the first person in your family to go to college, or the first person in your family to get married,” Palmer explained. “There's so many firsts that can happen as the generations of your family continue to grow and evolve.”

Around the 13-minute mark of a 2022 episode of the Los Angeles Times podcast The Envelope, Palmer praised her parents, Larry and Sharon Palmer, for “doing a good job in ensuring that she wasn’t “exploited in ways that made [her] feel less as a person.”