Keke Palmer shocked to find out Oprah Winfrey’s real name: ‘It’s still on your birth certificate?’
Keke Palmer shocked to find out Oprah Winfrey’s real name: ‘It’s still on your birth certificate?’
Joey NolfiFri, July 24, 2026 at 6:19 PM UTC
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Oprah Winfrey; Keke PalmerCredit: YouTubeKey Points -
Oprah Winfrey shocks Keke Palmer with real name reveal.
Palmer interviewed the legendary TV icon on her Baby, This Is Keke Palmer show.
Winfrey has revealed numerous details about her past recently, including opening up about a key change to her talk show’s iconic 2004 car giveaway episode.
Sorry to this government name, but Keke Palmer didn’t know who you were until this moment.
The Hustlers actress reacted with great surprise upon learning talk show icon Oprah Winfrey’s birth name, with the pair discussing the TV personality’s official biblically inspired title on a new episode of the Baby, This Is Keke Palmer show (below).
“Now wait a minute, I found out that your name was originally Orpah,” Palmer told Winfrey, who confirmed that “it was Orpah, from the Bible. Ruth, first chapter, 14th verse.”
Winfrey recalled that she was named after “that whole Ruth and Naomi story” in the Bible, before Palmer asked what made her change her name to her celebrity moniker.
“It’s not what made me. I was a kid, and nobody knew how to spell it. It turned out, on my birth certificate, it’s Or-pah, then people started calling me Oprah,” Winfrey recalled.
She added, “It’s just a difference between the P being before the R or after the R. Once they started with Oprah, that’s it.”
Winfrey admitted that she also “didn’t learn until I was probably 20 or something that this isn’t really my name,” with Palmer asking her if her birth certificate says “Orpah” or “Oprah,” with Winfrey confirming that the former is printed on the official document.
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Palmer and Winfrey’s discussion previously made headlines after the actress joked with Winfrey about her abandoned pursuit of singing, which included the launch of the often-meme’d theme song, “Run On,” which once accompanied The Oprah Winfrey Showfor a brief period in the late 1990s.
“Girl, please,” Winfrey, 72, told 32-year-old Palmer after the actress sang a line of the song to her amid the interview. “That is one of the mistakes of my career.”
Oprah Winfrey and Keke Palmer on ‘Baby, This Is Keke Palmer’Credit: YouTube
Palmer told Winfrey that the song “wasn’t bad,” though Winfrey pushed back: “You know it was bad,” she stressed. “You’re just saying that cause you’re looking at me. It was pretty bad.”
Winfrey was also in the press earlier this week for an interview she did with Vanity Fair, in which she revealed a key change to her talk show’s memorable 2004 car giveaway episode.
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“And it occurred to me, and I said to the producers, who were up all night long, actually, for this show, ‘We’ve got to tape the keys in the boxes because the first thing people are going to do is shake the box,’” Winfrey recalled of the installment, which saw her gift the entire studio audience with keys to a brand new car. “I don’t know if people know this, but we had already given out 11 cars. We’d given out 11 cars on this particular day. There was this 12th car, there was supposedly one car left, and everybody was thinking they were going to be that one person.”
Watch Winfrey and Palmer discuss the talk show legend’s real name in the interview video above.
on Entertainment Weekly
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
