Pete Davidson is covering Variety in an extensive piece mostly promoting How to Rob a Bank, with Nicholas Hoult and Zoe Kravitz, out next month. Pete is a good interview subject because he’ll tell you all his business. He’s always done that, with mixed results. Pete is cool with all his exes, he mentions Kim Kardashian and Ariana Grande here, and he got sober over two years ago. He’s very affected by the negativity that comes along with being a public figure. It doesn’t sound like that’s going to change, but being a father has helped him put it into perspective. Here’s part of what Pete told Variety, with much more at the source. It’s a well-written article without the fluff that so often comes with celebrity profiles.
On his baby daughter, Scottie
“Scottie is my whole life… 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 f-kin’ 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.’”He did a lot of drugs before getting sober over two years ago
“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.”He says he’s sober now, save around “four beers a year.” “I don’t f-k 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 the media’s focus on his love life
“It’s been over a decade. My work and my relevance is super overlooked, and it’s confusing to me… 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.”)“What the f-k do I have to do? And look, I get it — I’ve dated a lot of people. But so has everyone else! Everyone is f-king 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 f-k around and do drugs and have fun and be in Hollywood like everybody else? Sorry, everyone!”
There’s much more in this story, including Pete’s thoughts on Kanye targeting him when Pete was dating Kim Kardashian, and his take on the Kardashians in general. Pete respects the Kardashians and never felt coerced into joining their media circus. He’s way too generous to Kanye, saying that Kanye must not believe the horrible things he says and is just doing it to disgust the public. This is Pete’s biggest issue, that the public is somehow rejecting him personally. He’s mad that people focus on his personal life instead of his work, when he has put his relationships front and center for years. He doesn’t see that haters are an inescapable part of celebrity. If only he would give himself the same grace he gives other people, he might be able to get out of his own way.
