Angela Bassett is okay with making fun of herself a little.
The 9-1-1 star, 65, appeared on Wednesday’s episode The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and reacted to a video of Keke Palmer doing her best Bassett impression during a late-night appearance in November 2021.
“You know who loves you? Our friend Keke Palmer. We love Keke. She came on our show and she did an impression of you,” host Jimmy Fallon said before introducing the flashback.
The video showed Palmer, 30, reprising Bassett’s role as Katherine Jackson in the 1992 miniseries. The Jacksons: The American Dream.
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“I’m doing one that I don’t know if you’ve seen. It’s American dream. The Michael Jackson story where she plays Katherine Jackson,” Palmer said in the video. “And that’s the moment where she discovers Joe [Jackson] he cheated on her, and he enters [and she says] ‘You’re a liar, you’re a cheat and I don’t want you. I don’t want you, I don’t want you.'”
Bassett was shown in the lower right corner of the screen laughing as a clip of Palmer played. After she finished, Fallon, 49, asked: “Is that great?”
“That’s great. A little shiver,” Bassett replied.
The talk show host then asked Bassett about her experience playing Palmer’s mom in the 2006 film Akeelah and the bee.
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Angela Bassett on ‘The Tonight Show’.
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“That’s my child. She asked me to be her mom Akeelah and the bee. I was so touched. I’m so proud of her,” Bassett said.
Palmer recalled how Bassett helped her during the filming of the project when the two interviewed each other for vanity fair in December 2022. The Password The host said Bassett advised on performing the crying scene, which was “a lot of pressure”.
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(LR) Keke Palmer, Angela Bassett in ‘Akeelah and the Bee’.
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“I just remember you looking at me, grabbing my hand and saying, ‘You love what you do, don’t you?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I like to act,'” Palmer said of Bassett. “You said: ‘And who is doing this with you?’ I said, ‘I do it with my mom. We do everything together all the time.’ And you said, ‘What if she said, ‘I can’t do this with you anymore. You’re going to do it all alone if you’re going to do it at all, and I can’t be there with you?’ How would that make you feel?'”
Palmer said she “immediately started crying” after speaking with Bassett and credited her with helping her “just focus, and not just focus, but connect it to something that’s real for me.”
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Source: HIS Education