Pete Davidson is back — 20 pounds heavier, off drugs and single. He’s also raring to go for a nostalgic, high-wire “Saturday Night Live” weekend.”
Along with pretty much every other past and present cast member, he’ll appear on “SNL50: The Anniversary Celebration,” airing live on NBC and Peacock at 8 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 16.
But he admits that when he recently watched his audition for the show — filmed in 2014, when he was just 20 years old and wearing a Spiderman T-shirt from Target — he cried.
“The innocence in my eyes made me so sad,” Davidson told Page Six of the footage, featured in Peacock’s “Beyond Saturday Night” docu-series. “Showbiz is so tough, and I didn’t know how tough it was.
“I picked the wrong business to have a mental illness and go into. I’m one of the most insecure and sad people ever, and I picked the most insecure, sad business to go into,” the 31-year-old Staten Island native said — partly joking, partly being his disarmingly candid self.
Davidson, who has been very open about his struggles with sobriety and diagnoses of borderline personality disorder and PTSD, added that, at least in the early years, he felt like a bit of an outsider on the show.
“Everyone was 10-plus years older than me and I had a hard time fitting in. No one was mean, but there was an age difference,” he said, “They were getting married, having kids and I was like, ‘Do you guys want to come over to play video games?!’ So I hung out with Lorne.”
Show creator and producer Lorne Michaels took a chance on Davidson — one of the youngest people to ever be cast on “SNL” — without a grand plan.
“Lorne told me, ‘I’m not really sure what to do with you, but I know you should be here,” Davidson recalled. “And it was life changing.I owe him my entire career and I love the guy. He’s one of my closest friends.”
Even when Davidson had doubts himself, Michaels “reassured me that I belonged … He’s my Tony Soprano and I’m his Christopher Moltisanti. One day he might kill me — and it would be worth it!”
But he also admitted that, while on the show, a lot of the noise around his personal life got too loud. It’s easy to look at Davidson’s love life and think he’s the luckiest Casanova in the world. The comedian didn’t always see things that way, though.
“It was pretty humiliating and upsetting, honestly. Everyone is dating everyone and it’s Hollywood. Look at Paul Mescal, Timmy [Chalamet], Barry Keough,” he said. “But because I’m ugly, they wrote about me. I was harassed for like five years and it made my life a living hell.”
“It’s embarrassing because you want people to write about your work. I was one of the youngest ever cast members on ‘SNL’ and all that got pushed to the side because of who I was dating,” he said.
He’s been linked to Kim Kardashian, Kaia Gerber, Kate Beckinsale, Larry David’s daughter Cazzie David, actresses Phoebe Dynevor and Margaret Qualley, and Chase Sui Wonders, his co-star in his one-season Peacock sitcom “Bupkis.”
There was also a whirlwind engagement to Ariana Grande that lasted for about four months in 2018.
“When we see each other, which is few and far between, because we’re not in the same circles, it’s all love,” Davidson said of the singer and actress, now up for an Academy Award for “Wicked,” adding, “I hope she wins the Oscar, I hope she takes the gold.
“I’ve had some pretty adult relationships with some pretty amazing women, and when it’s ended it’s been cool,” he said.
The actor insists it was as embarrassing as it was flattering when the internet declared he had BDE — big d–k energy.
“I’m a very sensitive person and it’s humiliating to see a picture of yourself eating a sandwich in a pink T-shirt with the headline ‘This is what BDE is,’” Davidson said.
Still he was more than happy to strip off for ads for Reformation, the women’s clothing company, that debuted this week: “If you’re going to be in underwear showing your mushrooms, you might as well get it out of the way before you turn 40!”
His most recent relationship, with “Outer Banks” actress Madelyn Cline, ended last summer.
“Now, over the last 6 months, I’m not dating,” Davidson said. “I’m starting to turn my life around.”
He’s on a full cleanse — not just from women, but also drugs, social media (“If I need to know something, my friends will tell me”) and tattoos.
It’s going to take 10 years to laser them off, Davidson said, and he regrets “all of them” — telling Seth Meyers, “I made a lot of those decisions before rehab, so I have the dumbest tattoos. I got a collection of cartoons smoking blunts like a Muppet smoking a blunt, the Tootsie Pop owl smoking a blunt.”
Now, he told Page Six, “I’ve had six months of good living and working hard, and I realize that if you want to be treated the way you want to be treated, you have to do the work.”
He’s gained 20 pounds to his once-scrawny frame with the help of a family friend, trainer Chris Howard. “He comes over every morning, I take my creatine. He’s really changed my life. I’m taking it really seriously,” Davidson said.
The comic said he’s very much a work in progress and looks at semi-regular rehab visits like a tune-up.
At his public worst, the NYPD was prompted to conduct a “wellness check” on Davidson in 2018, at the “SNL” studio, after he posted an Instagram message that read “I really don’t want to be on this earth anymore.”
What finally helped him change, he told Page Six, was listening to the people who love him. Davidson was just seven year old when lost his dad, NYPD firefighter Scott Matthew Davidson, on 9/11.
“I had someone in my family say something to me one of the last times I went away [to rehab],” he recalled. “They said, ‘I’m so afraid to look at an article to see that you’re gone,’ and that kind of hit me in the balls.It made me be like, showbiz is not my life anymore. If I get to do it, great. But I’m someone’s son, brother, friend, grandson.
“That’s the most important thing and I lost sight of that. I got lost in the Hollywood bubble. Honestly, I think that people shouldn’t be able to become famous until they’re at least 30, when they’re ready and they know how to behave.”
He feels for other stars now under the harsh glare of the spotlight.
“I look at other celebrities and I’m less judgy. They’re dogging Bieber now — leave the kid alone, he’s clearly exhausted and just trying to be a father to his kid,” said Davidson, who aspires to a life like his friend John Mulaney has, with a wife and kids.
“I hope that happens for me,” he said.
Meanwhile, he’s “stoked” to be starring in “DogMan,” the animated film that’s currently No. 1 at the box office. He has several movies in the pipeline and is eager to change his image in Hollywood.
“It’s a dream of mine to get directors to look at me in a different way,” he said, referencing how Adam Sandler has been able to negotiate both comedy and drama. “I want to shock people.”
Davidson stayed on “SNL,” which he calls the “Harvard of comedy shows,” until 2022. His favorite sketches include the Barbie skit “I’m Just Pete” and “Farewell, Mr Bunting,” a send-up of “Dead Poets Society” — “Still to this day, I’ve never heard a sound like that in the studio,” he said of the laughter.
Davidson said he has “zero regrets” about his time on the show and can’t wait to join Sunday’s live 50th special.
“Every week is hell week,” he laughed. “This is, we have 5 seconds on the clock and we’re down 12, but in true ‘SNL’ fashion it will correct itself.”
