Pete Davidson has cleaned up his act. I couldn’t be happier for him
Pete Davidson sure does clean up nice.
The comedian, who was once covered in nearly 200 tattoos, appeared this week in a new ad for the women’s fashion brand Reformation, showing off an ink-free torso. His arms and legs are also the pale shade of his God-given flesh.
It was a welcome change from his former look — a scrawny, scribbled-on frame that could have been mistaken for a graffitied wall on the Lower East Side.
The 31-year-old Staten Island native looks healthy. He looks happy (the animated movie “Dog Man,” in which he voices a villainous cat, topped the box office this week). He looks like he has gone through some sort of magical portal into adulthood.
And the world on the other side of that door seems pretty sweet for Davidson, who New York has watched grow up.
He joined “Saturday Night Live” as a 20-year-old and endured very public battles with both substance abuse and mental health; his tats were, seemingly, physical manifestations of that turbulence. He’s reportedly been on a mission to wipe them off his body since 2020.
“I was a sad boy,” he recently told Jimmy Fallon in his trademark self-deprecating manner. “It was a weird time.”
He also copped to the obvious: His taste in the curation of his body art was, um, questionable. SpongeBob, at least six Harry Potter tattoos, a toaster and the word “Warning“ were some of the masterpieces he chose.
“I made a lot of those decisions when, you know, before rehab. So I got the dumbest tattoos,” Davidson told Seth Meyers.
The actual process, he admitted, was worse than getting inked. But he’s clearly committed. And it’s impossible to not root for the guy — for his well-being, sanity and stability.
His life has been imprinted by so many Big Apple cultural hallmarks and, also, our great tragedies. He lost his firefighter father on 9/11 and remains close to his Staten Island roots, even if he does take the occasional dig at his home borough.
But it’s clear he loves it. What else could drive someone to buy a decommissioned Staten Island ferry for $280K, like he did with his former “SNL” co-star Colin Jost? Even if you think it’s nuts, you’ve gotta admit that’s the ultimate expression of sentimentality.
Davidson is a quintessential New York character with the outer-borough attitude to match. That’s an almost endangered species these days.
And I know there are plenty of confused folks on the internet who can’t quite seem to pinpoint or define his unconventional magnetism — the same one that helped him to pull a roster of beautiful celebs including Kim Kardashian, Margaret Qualley, Kate Beckinsale, Ariana Grande and Kaia Gerber.
Jokes about big d–k energy — a cheeky phrase coined specially for him a few years ago — aside, I think it’s his humor and the willingness to tuck away his ego.
For a video with Reformation, he plays a doting boyfriend who love bombs a girl off-camera. But that’s his trick. He’s in on the joke. Always poking fun at himself and unabashedly wearing his heart, and bad decisions, on his sleeve.
Like a good New Yorker, he’s busting his own chops.
I witnessed Davidson’s commanding charm firsthand back in 2016, during a Springsteen show at Madison Square Garden. I sat in front of him and his friends. He offered me a hit of his joint; content with my beer, I politely declined.
But later, when his pals were chatting loudly as Springsteen started to play one one of my favorite songs, “Fade Away,” I told them to pipe down so I could hear it. A cheeky Davidson, partly poking fun at me and partly being a good neighbor, told them, “Everyone shut up. It’s her favorite song. This is her time.”
Everyone did, in fact, shut up, after a few laughs. I got to hear the sentimental song, uninterrupted. And I flashed him a grateful grin.
I’m glad to see, nearly a decade later, that he hasn’t chosen to “fade away” and instead seems ready to write a whole new chapter on his own blank slate.
