Say the name “Pete Davidson” aloud, and it will conjure a certain image: a man strutting down the street in baggy pants, swarmed by paparazzi, clenching the hand of a screen beauty with a grin on his face. A man who’s dated everyone from Ariana Grande and Margaret Qualley to Kate Beckinsale and Kim Kardashian, who inspired the term “big dick energy” and the earworm “Thank U, Next.”
“There should be a group for us,” Davidson jokes of guys like himself and Jake Gyllenhaal who’ve been the subject of breakup anthems. “It’s something that comes up once in a while. But I think Ariana’s fuckin’ cool and immensely talented and an awesome girl. We’re not texting or whatever, but we’re cool.”
It’s easy to see why women are drawn to Davidson. In person, he’s imposingly rangy and muscular and shoots you straight — a working-class fella from Staten Island, unlike those posh theater kids running around Hollywood. He’s also possessed of a wounded, underdog quality that invites warmth. You want him to be OK.
Davidson’s lothario image has come to overshadow his obvious talent: In 2014, at the age of 20, he became one of the youngest “Saturday Night Live” cast members ever, regaling audiences with his direct-to-camera monologues about his mental health and the travails of living at home with his mom in Staten Island. By 26, he was starring in his own Judd Apatow-helmed biopic, “The King of Staten Island,” which was supposed to be his “Trainwreck” moment, only to have its release derailed by COVID. In the years since, he’s performed stand-up to sold-out theaters alongside pals Jon Stewart and John Mulaney; popped up in films like “Fast X” and “Dumb Money”; created and starred in “Bupkis,” a critically acclaimed TV series based on his life; dated a Kardashian; hosted his own talk show on Netflix; and fathered a child.
Now the 32-year-old is making his big return to the silver screen in November’s “How to Rob a Bank,” playing a wounded war veteran who turns to robbing banks to provide for his family. He took the assignment seriously, packing on 15 pounds of muscle for the role. “I got on all the peptides that everyone’s doing. They work,” he says. Davidson took Sermorelin and BPC-157 while training around the clock and consuming loads of protein. “I just think it’s really important for people to know that that’s what I did. When someone says, ‘Whoa, you’re in tremendous shape!’ and an actor goes, ‘Yup! Just broccoli, rice and chicken!,’ it’s like, ‘No, dude, you have a fuckin’ vein going from your forehead to your thumb.’”
“How to Rob a Bank” is his most dramatic role yet, and he steals every scene he’s in. So are people finally ready to take Davidson seriously?
Directed by David Leitch (“Bullet Train”) and hitting theaters Nov. 13, “How to Rob a Bank” is a hyperkinetic action film that follows a group of 20-somethings (led by Nicholas Hoult) who’ve been screwed by the system and turn to bank robbery as payback, livestreaming their heists on social media in the hope of igniting a movement. Davidson plays Vince, Hoult’s second in command and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan whose lungs have been ravaged by exposure to burn pits.
“What Pete is doing in this movie isn’t something he’s put on. It’s him,” says Leitch. “Pete, in real life, is one of the warmest, most engaging people I’ve ever worked with. Disarming. People feel safe around him in about 10 seconds.”
Knowing his days are numbered, Vince robs banks to provide for his wife and young child. The film’s most heartbreaking scene sees Davidson’s character singing to his daughter over the phone before a deadly shootout ensues, and the actor nails it. No wonder: Right before filming, Davidson discovered he and his then-partner, Elsie Hewitt, were expecting a daughter.
“Once I got in the room [with the young actress], I got really choked up. It really fucked me up.” His voice begins to crack. “What happens to the character is adjacent to what happened to me with my dad” — a firefighter who died in the line of duty on 9/11, when Davidson was 7 — “and the age and all that. … I’m a comic first, so I never understood when actors would be like, ‘It was very painful.’ But it is. It was very tough, and the first time I felt like a real actor because I wasn’t just playing myself.”
The first time Davidson played himself was supposed to be his splashy movie-star debut. He’d received plaudits for his turn in the Sundance dramedy “Big Time Adolescence,” but “The King of Staten Island” was an Apatow movie dropping at South by Southwest — or at least that was the plan. It was March 2020, and the festival was canceled due to COVID. With theaters around the country shuttered, the movie was released digitally that June.
Davidson’s first thought was “I hope the world is OK.” Then came the intrusive ones. “It definitely helped me believe my self-fulfilling prophecy that I am doomed,” he recalls.
The film was a particularly personal one for Davidson. In a story based on his Staten Island upbringing, the comic plays Scott, a 24-year-old high school dropout grappling with the loss of his firefighter father, who died in a blaze when Scott was 7. Scott (named for Davidson’s father) suffers from Crohn’s disease, PTSD and depression — just like Davidson.
“I wanted to make ‘The King of Staten Island’ because I was interested in exploring the sacrifice Pete’s father made for others and how it affected Pete and his family,” explains Apatow. “Pete has always been able to find comedy in the most challenging subject matter. He is fearless, never censors his truth and is always willing to show you everything.”
Bill Burr, whom he tapped to play his mother’s boyfriend in the film, lauded Davidson’s leadership on set: “He was considerate about everybody else’s time. And as the star, he could’ve requested to be shot out of scenes, and instead, he chose to have his fellow actors wrapped before him. It was a level of maturity and consideration that you don’t see a lot in any business.”
It was in the summer of 2023, after the release of “Bupkis,” an autobiographical series on Peacock starring Davidson as himself, that Davidson says he reached rock bottom. He was one year removed from “Saturday Night Live,” which had given him much-needed structure, with no projects on the horizon. “Playing yourself and constantly living in your own crap” had forced him to revisit a number of harrowing moments in his life, so he used drugs to numb the pain. “It was K. I was getting liquid and cooking it,” he says. “And I would do acid and shrooms and whippets and smoke weed all day and eat pills every day. It got scary because I didn’t feel high. I felt high when I wasn’t doing it, so I was like, this is a huge problem.”
An emotional FaceTime call with his mother, Amy, convinced him to get clean. “She told me her biggest fear was waking up one day to see on the news that something bad had happened to me,” recalls Davidson. “I reached a point where I couldn’t do that to her anymore.”
Davidson checked himself into rehab and, even though Peacock had renewed “Bupkis” for a second season, walked away from the show. He was tired of playing himself, tired of turning his trauma into content. He wanted more for his career. He wanted, more than anything, to be taken seriously. “I was part of the problem of what I hated the most, which was the invasiveness around my personal life. I was just lobbing it up and continuing the narrative,” admits Davidson. He’d gone to rehab plenty of times to placate other people, but never because he really wanted to get clean. “When I turned 30 and I was there, it was a real low point. Nothing much was going on with my career and I was like, ‘This fuckin’ sucks. I can’t do it anymore.’ And it can’t be for anyone or for a job. You really have to want it, and when you’re done, you’re done.”
He says he’s sober now, save around “four beers a year.” “I don’t fuck with drugs anymore. It’s been two or three years from doing really hard stuff and about a year or more from weed. Weirdly, the hardest thing to stop was weed,” he says. “And now it’s easy because I have a kid. Anytime there’s ever a thought, I look at my phone background and go, ‘Oh yeah, no.’”
On top of kicking drugs, Davidson is in the process of getting most of his nearly 200 tattoos removed. “One, they were fuckin’ horrible,” he cracks. “Two, it was a business decision. I hated coming into the makeup trailer three hours early to spray-paint over horrible fuckin’ tattoos. And third, I was like, ‘I’m not this dude.’ I got these when I was in an immense amount of pain and I was trying to show people my pain.”
Davidson has struggled with self-harm. “I used to cut, so some of [the tattoos] covered up the cuts,” he says.
He will be keeping a few, though, including the one of Hillary Clinton in a power suit on his right leg: “She stays. That’s my dog. I love Hillary, man. She’s awesome and a good friend.”
As I wait for our interview to begin, Davidson is pacing the hotel room. We are moments away from capturing the cover photo — the comedian standing tall and triumphant atop lower Manhattan — and he’s adorned in a striped tracksuit and big dark sunglasses, the latter a remedy for the concussion he suffered days earlier shooting the film “Tommy Karate.” But Davidson seems with it — or is doing a really good job of acting like it. His head isn’t the thing bothering him at the moment.
It is Sept. 9, one day before “NYC Still Rising After 25 Years,” a comedy benefit for 9/11 charities at Madison Square Garden organized by Davidson and Stewart and featuring an all-star roster of stand-up comics. Two of Davidson’s pals have bailed at the last minute. He removes his sunglasses and turns to his team. “Why the fuck would they do that?” he says. They shrug their shoulders.
Then his phone rings. It isn’t another comedian dropping out of the event, but his ex, Hewitt. He answers and sees their 9-month-old daughter, Scottie, staring back at him. “Hello, sweetie!” he exclaims, beaming from ear to ear. “Beebeebooboo,” he coos while taking their FaceTime session to a back room and closing the door behind him. One minute passes. Then two. Then three. A crowd has formed in the room — publicists, assistants, photo editors — waiting on Davidson. We are now running behind schedule. Will he ever emerge? Ten minutes later, the door swings open, and it is as though all his troubles have washed away.
“Scottie is my whole life,” Davidson says of his baby girl, who’s named after Davidson’s dad. “I was living or dying on this business and what I thought people thought of me. It was all validation and ‘If I do this, then I’ll do that.’ But as soon as I saw her for the first time, I was like, ‘Oh my God, none of this fuckin’ matters at all. It’s a job. If I get to do cool stuff, great; if not, cool, I get to be home more with my kid.’”
This time of year is always tough for Davidson. The loss of his father at such a young age left him with severe PTSD and crippling bouts of depression, which he manages to this day. “It’s tough going to firehouses where a lot of the guys knew my dad. It’s just a lot,” he says. “I got kind of used to it, but this year is different because of my kid. And I’ll be my dad’s age [when he died] in two months. Now I just understand it a little differently.”
He pauses. “I understand it more from my mom’s side. That would be like my daughter’s mom not having me around and having to do it alone. My mom did that and never fuckin’ complained once. I look at that like, ‘Holy shit. My mom is the best. How fuckin’ lucky am I?’”
There is also “the peanut gallery,” as he calls them — the army of online haters who’ve spent years scolding him for telling the occasional 9/11 joke as a way to cope with his grief. “For a while it bothered me when I would get, ‘Oh, why is he talking about 9/11 and his dad and all this stuff?’ from weird people on the internet, like it was all I talked about. I’ve made maybe five jokes about it in my specials over a span of 16 years, and then every 9/11 I try and do a benefit to help out. So I have my blinders on and do whatever I feel is necessary to do.”
I ask Davidson about a recent tale told by President Trump at a 9/11 anniversary event involving a pair of firefighters lifting him from the rubble near ground zero mere moments after the attacks. (Records and eyewitness accounts show he was miles away at Trump Tower.) “Nothing that guy says is surprising anymore,” Davidson laments. “It’s sad that it’s to the point where it’s so ridiculous that you’re like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ He’s the drunk uncle, but he has the keys to the nukes. That’s the problem. If he didn’t have those keys, you’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s just the silly drunk uncle. He’s old.’ That’s unfortunate that he said that, though, because that’s definitely not what happened.”
As a teenager, Davidson would sit in the back of the bus and write jokes on his way to and from basketball games and try them on his teammates. They eventually goaded a 16-year-old Davidson to enter an open mic night called “Wacky Wednesdays” at The Looney Bin, a Staten Island comedy club tucked inside a bowling alley. “There were four people there, it went good enough, and I really loved it and got addicted to the laughs,” he remembers. “Growing up not having many friends and having a moment where you’re talking and everyone’s listening was very attractive to me.”
His first TV performance came on the VH1 reality series “Mob Wives.” Set in Staten Island, the show followed a number of women whose husbands were jailed for mob-related activities. Davidson was 18 and working as a chauffeur in real life, driving a guy around Staten Island. “I had to drive him to a party, and something happened where there was a fight, and he ran back into the car with his suit ripped in half,” Davidson says laughing. “I drove the getaway car. That’s my first TV gig ever.”
Then Davidson joined “SNL.” He got the gig thanks in large part to Bill Hader, who acted with the young comedian in “Trainwreck.” “He was in one scene in the movie, and I thought he was funny, so I texted Lorne [Michaels] and sent him a video of Pete’s stand-up. He obviously loved it,” Hader recalls, adding, “He didn’t need much advice. He was self-possessed and eager to show his stuff.”
Davidson says it took him a while to settle into “SNL”: “I wanted to leave after my first year and asked Lorne to leave every year. I was like, ‘I don’t fuckin’ work in this! And I just tell my stand-up on ‘Update’ and then burn it and can’t do it on the road, and I just want to do stand-up,’ and he’d always be like, ‘You’ll figure it out after four years.’ And he was right.”
Davidson found his footing with the character Chad, a monosyllabic stoner who navigates intense situations with apathy, and the memorable Please Don’t Destroy sketch “Three Sad Virgins” with Taylor Swift. He decided to walk away from “SNL” in 2022. “After eight years, it was just time. I just happened to be 28 when I left, so it was a little weird, but Lorne was cool with it. I love Lorne. He’s my Yoda. I love him very much, and I’m grateful that we’re still pals.”
It was on “SNL” that Davidson met Kim Kardashian. The two shared a kiss as Aladdin and Jasmine in an October 2021 sketch and began dating shortly thereafter. Davidson was thrust into a reality-TV world of prying paparazzi and untold media scrutiny. “I’m one of the survivors — the few and the proud. We’re like the Marines,” he jokes of men who’ve dated Kardashians. “Look, man, that’s a really tough atmosphere if you’re not game. One of the things I love about Kim and that whole family is they’re like, ‘This is what we do.’ I found that very attractive and mature.
“And I was never subjected to anything I didn’t want to be a part of. She was super respectful of all of it, but the craze of that lifestyle — being followed everywhere, having security and looking over your shoulder — for a guy with mental stuff, and at the time drug problems, was a little too much for me. But we’re cool, and I have a lot of love for her, and I knew what I was getting into.”
The one thing he couldn’t predict was the wrath of her ex, Kanye West. Kardashian was still in the process of divorcing West when she began dating Davidson, and the rapper took it upon himself to make Davidson’s life a living hell, posting threats on Instagram and, in the music video for his song “Eazy,” depicting a Claymation Davidson getting kidnapped and beheaded. “What tripped me out is I was super open about mental stuff — everyone knows this about me — and it’s like he was [saying], ‘Kill yourself.’ And he did push me.”
As for whether Davidson, who’s half-Jewish, thinks he’s the reason why West started going on antisemitic rants, he chuckles. “What people don’t understand about that dude — and I’m not one-one-millionth as talented or influential or powerful as that dude, but I have dealt with a fraction of what he’s had to deal with public-wise — is that’ll do it. He’s also lost a parent and has mental stuff, and I don’t know how he deals with it or who he has around him. Probably a lot of people who want to be his friend. I’ve had that. When people are so far up your ass and constantly pushing and provoking you and not showing you love, you want to burn it all. I think it got to a certain point where he was like, ‘Leave me the fuck alone. I’m just going to say crazy shit.’ There’s zero way he really feels like that.”
Davidson jokes he did Kardashian a service by absorbing West’s attacks. “I like to think I got that one out of the way for her because whoever that guy was going to be was gonna get it,” he remarks. “I cleared the path for her to get back into the dating pool.”
As someone who deals with an immense amount of scrutiny regarding his own appearance, Davidson is pained to see the vitriol another ex, Grande, has been subjected to of late. “I don’t like it at all. It’s not cool. She’s a really strong person — I’ve witnessed it — and I don’t understand it. She knows how to handle this stuff though. She’s been around. So she’ll be OK, but I think it’s fucked up.”
The most frustrating thing for Davidson when it comes to his dating life — and the media’s fixation on it — is the amount he feels it’s detracted from his career, reinforcing the idea that he’s unserious, girl-crazy tabloid fodder. “It’s been over a decade. My work and my relevance is super overlooked, and it’s confusing to me,” he declares, suddenly working himself into a lather. We’ve struck a nerve. “I’m still only 32, but I have really crazy credits: nearly a decade at ‘SNL’; I hosted a year after I left; I worked with Gillespie and Gunn and Liman and Leitch and Judd and Edie and Pesci.” (Craig Gillespie, James Gunn and Doug Liman directed Davidson in, respectively, “Dumb Money,” “The Suicide Squad” and the forthcoming “Bitcoin.”)
Davidson’s voice is getting louder as he runs through his self-defense. “What the fuck do I have to do? And look, I get it — I’ve dated a lot of people. But so has everyone else! Everyone is fucking everyone in this business! Everyone! And for some reason it’s zeroed in on me, and I can’t feel sorry for myself because I put myself in those situations, but everyone else is doing it. I was in my 20s. Am I not supposed to fuck around and do drugs and have fun and be in Hollywood like everybody else? Sorry, everyone!”
If “How to Rob a Bank” is evidence that Davidson can nail a dramatic role, then “Tommy Karate” is the film he believes will really change people’s perception of him as an actor. Directed by Justin Chon from a screenplay Davidson wrote during his rehab stint in 2023, the film centers on Thomas Pitera, aka “Tommy Karate” — a real-life hit man for New York’s Bonanno crime family who is suspected of murdering 60 people. Pitera is tracked down by DEA agent Jim Hunt (Paul Walter Hauser), with Camila Mendes, Simon Rex and Gina Gershon joining in on the fun.
When Davidson sent the script around town, it received plenty of positive feedback, except for the idea that Davidson would portray Pitera. “They were like, ‘Pete Davidson? Fuck him,’” he recalls. “And I was like, ‘OK, I’m pretty used to it.’” He spent years shopping it around and considered letting someone else take on the role until a Zoom chat with Sylvester Stallone convinced him otherwise. Davidson contacted Stallone because he was trying to remake his favorite Stallone movie, the 1981 cop thriller “Nighthawks.” “He said something that really fucked me up,” Davidson recalls. “He goes, ‘I’ve seen some of your work. I think you could be a really good actor, but no one’s ever going to write a part for you that’s good. You have to write it yourself, and you have to take it.’ I was like, ‘Rocky is telling me to make “Rocky.”‘”
Davidson just wrapped principal photography on “Tommy Karate,” but photos from the Atlanta set depicting him in a clumsy wig and icy blue contacts leaked online, leading to more sniping at his expense. “I wish my fuckin’ wig was set, and I wasn’t eating in my photos. I promise you it doesn’t look like that in the movie,” he says. “If ‘Tommy Karate’ is not my coming-out party, then I have zero pulse on this business at all. I think people are going to be really surprised and be like, ‘What the fuck.’ And I’m not online, but I see what people are saying. It’s all negative. It’s so in the toilet and the bar is so low that it makes me even more excited. I hope more people trash it before it comes out because they really have no fuckin’ idea what we did. We’re really proud of it.”
“Tommy Karate” is expected to hit theaters in fall 2027 after making the festival rounds. Davidson also has wrapped “Wizards!,” a stoner comedy from David Michôd, and “Bitcoin,” a thriller about the cryptocurrency and its mysterious founder, Satoshi Nakamoto. He’s happy to be back in New York City, the place he’s called home his whole life. “You can have the absolute worst day of your life in public here, and nobody blinks. Everyone minds their own business because they’ve got somewhere to be,” he says.
But he’s mostly excited about spending time with Scottie, pushing her stroller around their Brooklyn neighborhood and trying to make her laugh. “It’s a lot of trial and error and a lot of bombing. If you think I bombed on ‘SNL,’ you should see me with my fuckin’ daughter.”
Whenever he talks about Scottie, Davidson lights up. He is adamant that he’s doing a lot better, and Scottie is the reason. “It’s filling a lot of emptiness. If you think the internet’s sick of Pete Davidson, I’m sick of it. I’m exhausted from being me all the time. That it’s all about her first is the best gift ever. It’s an indescribable feeling.” He smiles. “It’s the best, man. I’m excited to get up every day.”
Shot at W New – Union Square | Living Room | Guardian Rooftop; Styling: Britt Theodora/The Wall Group; Stylist assistants: Alexandra Crown, Taliana Esposito; Grooming: Kumi Craig/The Wall Group; Look 1 (cover): Tracksuit: Willy Chavarria/FWRD; T-shirt: Sunspel; Look 2 (Green Wall a Mirrored Look): Suit: Homme Plisse Issey Miyake; T-shirt: Sunspel; Hat: ’47; Sunglasses: Ferrari Style; Look 3 (Gray Sweater): Sweater: Helmut Lang; Pants: Versace/FWRD; Sunglasses: Jacques Marie Mage; Look 4 (Seated Stripe Shirt): Shirt, tie and shoes: Saint Laurent; Pants: Brut Archives; Sunglasses: Cubitts