Say the name “Pete Davidson” out loud, and it will conjure up a certain image: a man strutting down the street in baggy pants, swarmed by paparazzi, shaking hands with a movie beauty with a smile on his face. A man who has dated everyone from Ariana Grande and Margaret Qualley to Kate Beckinsale and Kim Kardashian, who inspired the term “big dick energy” and the earworm “Thanks, Next.”
“There should be a band for us,” Davidson jokes about guys like him and Jake Gyllenhaal who have been the subject of breakup anthems. “It’s something that comes up from time to time. But I think Ariana is really cool and extremely talented and a great girl. We don’t text or anything, but we’re cool.”
Mary Ellen Matthews for Variety
It’s easy to see why women are attracted to Davidson. In person, he’s imposing and muscular and shoots straight at you — a working-class guy from Staten Island, unlike those posh theater kids running around Hollywood. He also has a wounded and oppressed side that invites warmth. You want him to be okay.
Davidson’s lothario image eventually overshadowed his obvious talent: In 2014, at the age of 20, he became one of the youngest cast members on “Saturday Night Live,” regaling audiences with his on-camera monologues about his mental health and the struggles of living at home with his mother on Staten Island. At 26, he starred in his own Judd Apatow-directed biopic, “The King of Staten Island,” which was supposed to be his “Trainwreck” moment, but its release was derailed by COVID. In the years that followed, he performed stand-up to sold-out venues alongside friends Jon Stewart and John Mulaney; appeared in films like “Fast X” and “Dumb Money”; created and starred in “Bupkis,” a critically acclaimed television series based on his life; dated a Kardashian; hosted his own talk show on Netflix; and fathered a child.
Now, the 32-year-old makes his big screen return in November’s “How to Rob a Bank,” playing a wounded veteran who turns to robbing banks to support his family. He took the assignment seriously, building 15 pounds of muscle for the role. “I took all the peptides that everyone uses. They work” he says. Davidson took Sermorelin and BPC-157 while training around the clock and eating a lot of protein. “I just think it’s really important for people to know that’s what I did. When someone says, “Wow, you’re in great shape!” » and an actor says, “Yeah!” Just broccoli, rice and chicken!, it’s like, “No, dude, you have a fucking vein that runs from your forehead to your thumb.” »
“How to Rob a Bank” is his most dramatic role to date, and he steals every scene he appears in. So, are people finally ready to take Davidson seriously?
Directed by David Leitch (“Bullet Train”) and released in theaters Nov. 13, “How to Rob a Bank” is a hyperkinetic action film that follows a group of twenty-somethings (led by Nicholas Hoult) who have been cheated by the system and turn to bank robbing for revenge, livestreaming their heists on social media in hopes of sparking a movement. Davidson plays Vince, Hoult’s second-in-command and an Afghanistan war veteran whose lungs have been ravaged by exposure to burns.
“What Pete does in this film is not something he staged. It’s him“, says Leitch. “Pete, in real life, is one of the warmest and most engaging people I have ever worked with. Disarming. People feel safe with it 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 on the phone before a deadly shootout ensues, and the actor pulls it off. No wonder: Just before filming, Davidson discovered that he and his partner at the time, Elsie Hewitt, were expecting a girl.
“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 father” — a firefighter who died in the line of duty on 9/11, when Davidson was 7 — “and age and all that. … I’m a comedian first and foremost, so I never understood when actors would say, ‘That was very painful.’ But that East. It was very hard and the first time I felt like a real actor because I wasn’t just playing myself.
Davidson’s first time playing himself was supposed to be his breakout debut as a movie star. He had received plaudits for his role in the Sundance comedy-drama “Big Time Adolescence,” but “The King of Staten Island” was an Apatow film that aired on South by Southwest — or at least that was the plan. It was March 2020 and the festival was canceled due to COVID. With theaters across the country closed, the film was released digitally in June.
Mary Ellen Matthews for Variety
Davidson’s first thought was, “I hope the world is okay.” » Then came the intruders. “It definitely helped me believe in my self-fulfilling prophecy that I was doomed,” he recalls.
The film was particularly personal for Davidson. In a story based on his Staten Island upbringing, the comic stars as Scott, a 24-year-old high school dropout dealing with the loss of his firefighter father, who died in a fire when Scott was 7 years old. Scott (named after Davidson’s father) suffers from Crohn’s disease, PTSD, and depression – just like Davidson.
“I wanted to do ‘The King of Staten Island’ because I wanted to explore the sacrifice that Pete’s father made for others and how that affected Pete and his family,” Apatow explains. “Pete has always found comedy in the most difficult subjects. He is fearless, never censors his truth and is always ready to show you everything.”
Bill Burr, whom he hired to play his mother’s boyfriend in the film, praised Davidson’s leadership on set: “He was considerate of everyone’s time. And as a star, he could have asked to be filmed off-scene, and instead he chose to have his fellow actors in front of him. It was a level of maturity and consideration that you don’t see much 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 hit rock bottom. He was a 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 bullshit” had forced him to revisit a number of heartbreaking moments in his life, so he used drugs to numb the pain. “It was K. I would take liquid and cook it,” he says. “And I was doing acid and shrooms and whippets and smoking weed all day and eating pills every day. It was scary because I didn’t feel high. I felt high when I was not while doing it, then I was like this is a huge problem.
An emotional FaceTime call with his mother, Amy, convinced him to abstain. “She told me her biggest fear was waking up one day to see on the news that something bad had happened to me,” Davidson recalled. “I reached a point where I couldn’t do that to him anymore.”
Davidson checked himself into rehab and, even though Peacock had renewed “Bupkis” for a second season, left 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 of my personal life. I was just throwing it in and continuing the narrative,” Davidson admits. He had gone to rehab many times to appease other people, but never because he really wanted to get clean. “When I turned 30 and I was there, it was a really low point. There wasn’t much happening in my career and I was like, ‘This is fucking bad. I can’t do it anymore.” And it can’t be for anyone or for a job. We really have to to want and when you’re done, you’re done.
Mary Ellen Matthews for Variety
He says he’s sober now, saving about “four beers a year.” “I don’t fuck with drugs anymore. I’ve been doing really hard stuff for two or three years and about a year or more on weed. Oddly enough, the hardest thing to quit was weed,” he says. “And now it’s easy because I have a kid. Every time I have a thought, I look at the background of my phone and say, ‘Oh yeah, no.’
In addition to doing drugs, Davidson is in the process of having most of his nearly 200 tattoos removed. “First of all, they were horrible,” he cracks. “Second, it was a business decision. I hated coming to the makeup trailer three hours early to spray paint on horrible fucking tattoos. And third, I was like, ‘I’m not that guy.’ I got them when I was in a lot of pain and trying to show people my pain.
Davidson struggled with self-harm. “I used to cut, so some (of the tattoos) covered the cuts,” he says.
He’ll keep a few, though, including one of Hillary Clinton in a power suit on her right leg: “She’s staying. She’s my dog. I love Hillary, man. She’s great and a good friend.”
As I wait for our interview to begin, Davidson paces around the hotel room. We’re about to take the cover photo – the comedian standing tall and triumphant atop Lower Manhattan – and he’s adorned in a striped tracksuit and a large…
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