Pete Davidson, the comedian about to turn the age his firefighter father was on 9/11

Pete Davidson

Photo: LaVar James / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 16, 1993 Staten Island, New York, United States
Occupation	Comedian and actor
Known for	Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, The Suicide Squad, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

For more than a decade, Pete Davidson has walked back to the same wound on stage and found a different joke in it each time. His father, a New York firefighter, died when the towers fell, and the son turned the unbearable into material: first in a bowling alley near home, then at the news desk of America’s best-known sketch show, then in a film that restaged his own adolescence. What makes him hard to file is that the persona built on that loss has always travelled faster than the work. Tabloids know the girlfriends, the tattoos and the scandals. Far fewer people have noticed that the work is steering somewhere darker and more deliberate. And now the arithmetic has caught up with him: he is about to turn the age his father was on that morning, and he is raising a daughter who carries his father’s name.

Peter Michael Davidson grew up on Staten Island, the son of Amy Davidson and Scott Davidson, a firefighter with the New York City Fire Department. He was seven when his father was killed responding to the World Trade Center, one of the hundreds of firefighters lost that morning. By his own telling, he spent the years after the attacks acting out, cycling through schools and therapists. In his late teens he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a chronic condition he would later fold into his act with the same bluntness he brought to everything else. He finished at Xaverian High School in Bay Ridge, lasted a single semester at St. Francis College, and at sixteen told his first jokes into a microphone at a Staten Island bowling alley.

For a comic born on November 16, 1993, the early years were the usual grind with an unusual engine. Davidson worked the New York clubs while picking up television slots on MTV’s Failosophy, Guy Code and Wild ‘N Out, played a guest role on Brooklyn Nine-Nine and took a small part in Trainwreck. The breakthrough came quickly and at scale: on September 27, 2014, at twenty, he debuted as a cast member of Saturday Night Live, the first in the show’s history born in the 1990s. He was not a natural impressionist or a character-machine. His most memorable work came at the Weekend Update desk, playing a slightly exaggerated version of himself and talking about his father, his medication, his diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and his sobriety with a candour that network comedy rarely allowed.

He stayed eight seasons, and the show became both launchpad and cage. When he left at the end of the forty-seventh season in May 2022, alongside several long-serving colleagues, he had become one of the most recognisable faces the programme had produced in years, though a large share of that recognition had been generated off camera. He returned to host in October 2023, a measure of how the relationship had shifted from employee to alumnus with leverage.

The piece of work that explains him best remains The King of Staten Island, directed by Judd Apatow and written by Apatow, Davidson and Dave Sirus. Davidson plays Scott Carlin, a stalled twenty-something with a head full of tattoos and a firefighter father who died on the job, living with his mother, played by Marisa Tomei, until she starts dating a firefighter played by Bill Burr. It is fiction built on an unmistakable foundation, and it let Davidson show on screen the grief his stand-up had kept at the length of a punchline. The film went straight to on-demand platforms in June 2020 after the pandemic closed cinemas, which limited its reach but not its reputation among people who saw it.

Around that anchor he assembled a patchwork career of supporting roles that suited his particular screen presence, somewhere between charming and alarming. He was the magnetic bad influence Zeke in Jason Orley’s Big Time Adolescence, the short-lived Blackguard in James Gunn‘s The Suicide Squad, a spoiled host in Halina Reijn’s party horror Bodies Bodies Bodies and Kevin Gill, brother of the investor at the centre of the GameStop frenzy, in Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money. He voiced the title dog in Marmaduke, the Autobot Mirage in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts and the villainous Petey in the animated Dog Man. His stand-up specials tracked the same evolution, from SMD on Comedy Central to Alive from New York and Turbo Fonzarelli on Netflix.

The most personal of his television projects, Bupkis, arrived on Peacock in 2023. Davidson co-created, co-wrote and starred in the series as a heightened version of himself, with Edie Falco as his mother and Joe Pesci as his grandfather, mixing broad comedy with episodes about addiction and grief. Reviews were mixed, and although the show was renewed, he chose not to make a second season, an unusual decision for a performer so often described as a man who says yes to everything.

That description is where the critical reading of Davidson has to begin, because his public life has repeatedly overwhelmed his output. His engagement to Ariana Grande in 2018 and his relationship with Kim Kardashian between late 2021 and the summer of 2022 turned him into a permanent fixture of celebrity coverage, and the scrutiny was not always kind. In the same period he collected Golden Raspberry nominations for Marmaduke and Good Mourning, and in March 2023 he crashed a car into a house in Beverly Hills, a case that ended with a misdemeanour reckless-driving charge, community service and traffic school. His humour has drawn fire too, most loudly when the Diocese of Brooklyn demanded an apology over a joke comparing support for the Catholic Church to being a fan of R. Kelly. The sharpest backlash came in 2025, when he performed at the Riyadh Comedy Festival. Critics argued that a comedian whose father died on 9/11 lent cover to the Saudi state; Davidson answered on Theo Von’s podcast that he saw the routing, saw the fee and said yes, and later turned the episode into jokes on Saturday Night Live. The candour that made him compelling at twenty is the same quality that now gives his detractors the most material.

Away from the noise, the recent film choices point to a performer testing his range. He led James DeMonaco’s horror film The Home, released in cinemas in July 2025, playing a young man sent to work in a retirement home that hides something sinister, and days later appeared opposite Eddie Murphy and Keke Palmer in Tim Story’s heist comedy The Pickup on Prime Video. He also had a part in Dito Montiel’s crime comedy Riff Raff. By then he had spent years having roughly two hundred tattoos lasered off, explaining that he was trying to clean the slate and to be an adult.

The adult part became literal in December 2025. Davidson and the model Elsie Hewitt, who had gone public with their relationship that spring, welcomed a daughter, Scottie Rose, on December 12, named in memory of his father. The couple separated a few months later, around May 2026; after a public exchange over who was carrying the load, they issued a joint statement on July 31 saying they were cooperatively co-parenting and that their daughter’s well-being was their priority. He has held on to his Staten Island identity throughout, down to the decommissioned Staten Island Ferry he bought in 2023 with his former SNL colleague Colin Jost.

The year 2026 has been his busiest in public since leaving Saturday Night Live. On January 30, Netflix launched The Pete Davidson Show, a weekly video programme filmed largely in his garage in which he trades stories with famous friends, his fourth major project with the platform. In August he appeared in Will Gluck’s romantic comedy One Night Only, a Universal release that struggled at the box office. On September 10, on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the attacks, he co-headlined the benefit NYC Still Rising at Madison Square Garden with Jon Stewart, alongside Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, Nikki Glaser and Aziz Ansari, raising money for people affected by 9/11. In an interview with the New York Post before the show he said he had realised he was now the age his father was, adding that the anniversary was “extra tough, but also extra beautiful” because he would spend it with Scottie. He has kept touring as well, headlining the Rochester Fringe Festival and Toronto’s Meridian Hall in the last week of September.

What comes next is the clearest sign of where he wants to go. On November 13, 2026, Amazon MGM releases David Leitch’s heist comedy How to Rob a Bank, in which Davidson plays Vince alongside Nicholas Hoult, Zoë Kravitz, Anna Sawai and John C. Reilly. Further ahead is Tommy Karate, the most personal bet of his career so far: a crime thriller directed by Justin Chon, co-written by Davidson, Chon and Joseph Gay from Philip Carlo’s book about Thomas Pitera, a Bonanno family hitman hunted by the DEA agent Jim Hunt, played by Paul Walter Hauser. Davidson, who also produces, shot it in Atlanta over the summer of 2026 under long hair, blue eyes and facial prosthetics, with Camila Mendes and Simon Rex in the cast. David Michôd’s Wizards! is also waiting in post-production. For a comedian who made his name by playing himself, the next test is simple to state and hard to pass: whether audiences will let him disappear into somebody else.

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