Keke Palmer claims Ryan Murphy ‘ripped into’ her during Scream Queens production

Scream Queens star Keke Palmer has claimed that creator and director Ryan Murphy “ripped into” her after she didn’t show up to set on what she says was her day off.

With a cast that included Ariana Grande, Emma Roberts, Lea Michele and Jamie Lee Curtis, the comedy series followed the sorority sisters and pledges of Kappa Kappa Tau as they become the targets of a serial killer known as the Red Devil.

But, according to Hustlers star Palmer, there was almost as much tension among the cast and creator as there was on screen.

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times about her upcoming memoir Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative, which includes the anecdote about Murphy, Palmer talked about how “she’d been given her shooting schedule and arranged to fulfil another business obligation on a day off”.

But when that day rolled around, production told her that she was actually needed on set, she claimed. She decided to keep her prior obligation, which resulted in an angry phone call from Murphy in which allegedly told her that she was unprofessional.

“It was kind of like I was in the dean’s office,” Palmer continued. “He was like: ‘I’ve never seen you behave like this. I can’t believe that you, of all people, would do something like this’.”

A representative for Murphy did not respond to Variety when asked to comment.

Palmer wrote in her book that she believes this incident scuppered her chances of appearing in many future Murphy shows.

“I’m still not sure Ryan cared, or got it, and that’s OK because he was just centering his business, which isn’t a problem to me,” she added. “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.”

Palmer later returned for the second season of Scream Queens in 2016, but the show was cancelled soon after.

Murphy recently sparked controversy with his dramatisation of Lyle and Erik Menendez’s murder of their parents in his Monsters anthology series.

Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative is published on 19 November.

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