From teenage movie star in Akeelah and the Bee to talk-show host on Just Keke to master of camp on TV’s Scream Queens, Keke Palmer has tried everything Hollywood has to offer. And she’s just getting started.

“If an actor had a dream come true about an opportunity, it would have been this,” she says of the Fox series. “The script is brilliant, and it’s just so damn funny.” (Palmer gets to deliver lines like, “Bitch, I’m about to slap you so hard your tampon’s gonna pop out!”) But the series doesn’t shy away from the tough stuff. Despite the show’s absurdly murderous use of chainsaws and lawn mowers, its biting dialog manages a deft treatment of race—which often falls to Palmer’s character, Zayday Williams. “The way it’s written really is genius, because it’s real. They don’t tiptoe around—Emma Roberts’ character really would call my character a hood rat, and my character really would say, ‘Bitch, don’t act crazy ’cause I’mma come up your ass,’” she says. “But hopefully the way that Emma and I play it doesn’t feel like a caricature. It’s a heightened version of the comedy that we live day to day, like when a white girl says, ‘Is that really your hair?’ I love that about the show. I’m not one of those people who wants to ignore shit, but I’m also not the kind of person who doesn’t want to have fun with it.”

Palmer’s ability to broach the dark and light within a topic as divisive as racism is part of what makes her so compelling. There’s a wholeness to her, a concurrent depth and buoyancy that she reflects back onto her work: “When you tackle roles that take on racial and cultural issues, you have to be sure you’re representing the totality of the community you’re speaking to. Black people aren’t pent up; we’re not angry about every little comment—there’s an element of fun for us in these issues, too.”

That type of duality is apparent when I ask what she considers to be her chief struggle. “Vulnerability,” she answers. “I’m good at talking about it as a concept, analyzing why and how I’m not [vulnerable]. I really work on it, but it’s a habit to be so together. I’ll let people know what’s going on in my life, but not in a way that allows them to feel the moment with me.” Of course, a serious amount of vulnerability is required to even make that statement. But accepting herself—contradictions and all—is part of Palmer’s freedom-loving nature. Something, she points out, that Hollywood rarely allows, considering the standards of beauty women are held to. “Look at Kylie Jenner,” she says, raising her eyebrows. “People praise her so much for the work she’s had, saying she looks so much better now. But she had her lips done at 15—so what you’re telling me is that she was unattractive before? When she was a child? Are they even thinking about the effect that’s having?” She shakes her head in disgust. “What’s missing right now is that we don’t understand ‘natural’; we don’t respect it. A woman without makeup is considered hideous, and that’s just wrong. I hate that we praise people for being anything but themselves.”

Palmer may be a champion of authenticity, but she’s worked to get there herself—and not without the pain that inevitably accompanies introspection. “Something changed for me around the time that I did Cinderella. I’d been through a lot with my family, moving out of the house and living on my own, breaking up with my boyfriend,” she says. “I became anxious and depressed for a while and kept looking to other people to make me happy—it was wearing me out. Almost like a crash in my computer system, a virus, and I was ready to figure out where it had come from.” What she found was that it had little do with the world around her—the family, the new apartment, the ex-boyfriend; it all came back to square one. “I needed to be my own person, to make my relationship with myself most important. And the only way to do that was to love myself enough to know how I wanted to be treated.”