Pete Davidson: The Enneagram Type 9 Behind Comedy's Most Misunderstood Man

"I used to be a drug addict and I was a sad person, and I felt ugly and that I needed to be covered up."

Pete Davidson is removing his tattoos. All of them. Every last inked memory on his body. The Ariana Grande bunny ears behind his ear, the random impulse designs from years of numbing out, the entire patchwork autobiography of a man who didn't know who he was.

He's spent $200,000 so far. He's about 30 percent done. The process will take another decade.

A man spending years and a small fortune to erase the evidence of who he used to be. That detail tells you everything about Pete Davidson. He's been disappearing his whole life. Into substances. Into relationships. Into self-deprecating jokes that land before anyone else can throw the first punch. And now he's trying to disappear from his own skin.

But the contradiction makes Pete Davidson one of the most psychologically interesting people in comedy: he keeps showing up. The man who begged his boss to fire him stayed at Saturday Night Live for eight seasons. The man who told the internet he didn't want to be on this earth anymore now hosts a Netflix podcast from his garage. The man who said he "felt ugly and needed to be covered up" is methodically uncovering himself, one laser session at a time.

The tension between erasure and presence runs through everything.

TL;DR: Why Pete Davidson is an Enneagram Type 9

• The Chameleon: Jennifer Coolidge called him exactly this, someone you can never get a read on because he becomes whoever he's with.
• The Peacekeeper: His go-to move in every crisis is to diffuse tension through humor, even when the crisis is his own mental health.
• The 9w8 Snap: He texted Kanye West "I want everything to be smooth," and when Kanye kept pushing, fired back "I'm in bed with your wife." Classic peacemaker-to-fighter escalation.
• The Quiet Resilience: Behind the tabloid chaos is someone who fought his way to sobriety, fatherhood, and a career on his own terms.

The Boy Who Lost the Ground Beneath Him

On September 11, 2001, seven-year-old Pete Davidson's world cracked in half.

His father, Scott Davidson, was a firefighter stationed at Ladder Company 118 in Brooklyn Heights. When the planes hit the towers that morning, Scott's company raced across the Brooklyn Bridge. A photographer on a nearby rooftop captured their fire truck speeding toward Manhattan. The image was later published on the front page of the Daily News as "The Last Run of Ladder 118."

"That's my pops, dude," Pete said, showing Theo Von the photograph. "They were the first truck over there and the whole house died. Which is sad, but also at least he died with his pals."

Scott and his crew were sent to evacuate the Marriott World Trade Center, a hotel wedged between the towers. By the time the North Tower collapsed onto the building at 10:28 a.m., they had saved roughly 200 people who would have been trapped in the rubble.

A hotel elevator mechanic later recalled: "They weren't going to leave until everyone got out."

All six men in the truck died.

Pete's sister Casey was three, too young to carry real memories of their father. Years later, Pete would tell Maron he envied that. "I personally would like to not know. I wish I was in her position. You didn't know the guys at the firehouse, you didn't know your dad. I would like to start without a dad." Knowing his father and then losing him felt worse than never knowing at all.

Pete's parents had divorced nine months earlier. His mom told Marc Maron on WTF that if his dad came back, they'd get back together, extending a thread of hope that made the loss even more disorienting. Nobody knew Scott was dead for weeks. They were still pulling people from the rubble.

There were rumors he'd been seen helping a bellhop in the hotel, that maybe he was trapped in a kitchen somewhere with food and water. Pete was seven. He made up stories about where his dad might be.

His mom told him he was grounded and wasn't allowed to watch TV. He thought he was in trouble. One night he turned on the TV anyway and saw his father's face on the news.

Then came the unraveling. He started pulling his hair out, a condition called trichotillomania, until he was nearly bald in fourth grade. He bounced between three different schools. Kids were merciless.

One kid invited him to a birthday party and told him he was only there because his dad died. "That kind of taught me what death is," Pete told Maron. "Too young. Usually you get to high school, a couple kids kill themselves in their garage. A grandparent dies. You start to realize, oh, okay, we're not invincible. But right out the gate? And something that global?"

At eight, Pete tried to drown himself in the pool. His mother found him and he was admitted to a psychiatric ward. "I wanted to die to be with my dad," he told Theo Von.

There was one bright spot. America's Camp, a weeklong summer retreat in Massachusetts for children who lost parents on 9/11. Two to three hundred kids, all roughly the same age, all carrying the same invisible weight. Pete went for five years.

The counselors came from all over the world. They had a room called the Volcano Room, nothing but punching bags and breakable walls. "Kayaking, they'd be like, 'Anybody want to go? We have ten places.' Volcano Room? Sold out till Thursday," Pete told Maron. "Everybody's around the corner going to hit shit."

It was, by his own account, one of the few purely good things in his childhood.

"Dad says he's going to pick you up, he doesn't," Pete told Jon Bernthal on Real Ones, "so for life I don't believe anyone. I'm trying to learn how to believe people and Hollywood isn't the best place to learn that skill."

A Dare at a Bowling Alley

Pete's first standup set happened at sixteen, at the Loony Bin, a comedy club inside a Staten Island bowling alley, next to an LA Fitness, in a Wendy's parking lot. "The thing about that club is, when you're bombing, you hear people bowling and getting strikes," he told Maron.

Two kids from his basketball team, guys who were mean to him in front of the group but nice in private, told him he should try it. His mom sat at the bar. He didn't let her come in. Six people in the audience.

He did it. But only after smoking weed first.

That detail matters. Even in his first act of self-expression, Pete needed a buffer between himself and the moment. Something to soften the edges. Something to make it feel less like he was there, exposed, choosing to be seen.

He was hooked. He started taking the ferry to Manhattan after school every day to do open mics. Eastville, Broadway Comedy Club, the Lower East Side bars. "Once I started doing comedy is when I started making friends," he told Maron. "That's when I met people that were exactly like me. And most comics also have a horrible past of one kind or another. Something's off."

Within four years, he became the youngest cast member hired onto Saturday Night Live since Eddie Murphy. He was twenty. Bill Hader had spotted him in a small role in Amy Schumer's Trainwreck and recommended him to Lorne Michaels. Pete had never watched SNL. He grew up on SpongeBob and Drake & Josh. He YouTubed "SNL" the night before his writers' meeting. He was high when he met Lorne.

"Please fire me," Pete told Michaels after his first year. "I don't belong here. Everybody here is so talented and they don't want to be my friend."

Michaels told him it takes three or four years to figure out the show. That it's just going to suck for a while.

Pete stayed for eight.

What Pete's Comedy Actually Sounds Like

At SNL, Pete developed a specific role: the guy in the sketch who says "Hey, everybody!" while Kate McKinnon, Kenan Thompson, and everyone else did "a hundred million things." He described himself as "garbage" to Seth Meyers. He felt like a placeholder in a building full of geniuses.

The feeling went deeper than imposter syndrome. Pete told Bernthal about sitting backstage watching the cold open make jokes about his dating life, then walking out to do a sketch in front of the same audience. "The show made fun of you, so why are they going to laugh at you? They dogged you in front of everyone. And then you step out there and you're wearing a dress like a clock or something, and you're like, 'I'm a loser, man.'"

But Pete carved out something nobody else at 30 Rock could replicate. His Weekend Update segments turned his breakups, his mental health, and his father's death into material that made people laugh and wince in the same breath. He wasn't doing impressions or characters. He was doing something harder: being himself on camera, with a no-filter delivery that felt less like performance and more like confession.

He understood the strategy. "I can make fun of myself better than all of you," he told Bernthal, describing how his approach to comedy began. "It made me feel like Teflon. Whatever joke you say, I have a better one about myself." He added: "You could get away with more if you shoot yourself in the foot first. It opens up for people to be more receptive to hearing what you have to say because you're not coming from an ego standpoint."

His most memorable SNL creation was "Chad," a recurring character who is a comically laid-back dude stuck in high-stakes situations with intense people. Chad responds to everything, confrontation, seduction, existential crisis, with the same half-interested "OK, cool." A character that could only be written by someone who understands the Nine's instinct to stay unfazed when the world is on fire.

His standup specials map the evolution. SMD (2016), titled after his father's initials, Scott Matthew Davidson, though the acronym means exactly what you think, was joke-heavy and raw, delivered to a hometown crowd when he was twenty-two. Alive from New York (2020) shifted toward storytelling, peaking with a visceral stretch on his Grande breakup before closing with twelve uninterrupted minutes about his father. The kind of set where the room gets so quiet you can hear people deciding whether to laugh or cry.

By Turbo Fonzarelli (2024), critics noted his material was more worked out, his stage presence more confident. He'd gone from a kid who couldn't believe he was onstage to a comedian who'd earned his place there.

And for the record: Pete made exactly two jokes about his father over a fifteen-year comedy career. "People are like, 'Oh, he's probably just talking about his dead dad all the time,'" he told Bernthal. "I made two jokes about my dad in a span of like 15 years. To act like I'm this 'feel bad for me, my dad,' that makes me feel so small. I'm trying to keep that memory alive."

What is Pete Davidson's Personality Type?

Pete Davidson is an Enneagram Type 9

Enneagram Nines are called The Peacemaker, and their core desire is deceptively simple: inner peace. Not fame. Not achievement. Not intensity. Quiet. Calm. The feeling that everything is okay and nothing is about to go wrong.

The problem is that the world keeps not cooperating.

For Nines, the path to peace often leads through paradox. They avoid conflict so thoroughly that unresolved tension builds like pressure in a sealed container. They merge with the people around them so completely that they lose track of their own wants, opinions, and identity. They numb out through substances, routines, distractions, because feeling nothing is safer than feeling everything.

The evidence for Pete as a Type 9 runs deep:

• Becoming whoever he's with: Pete doesn't just date people; he becomes them. With Grande, he tattooed her brand onto his body. With Kim Kardashian, he showed up in Skims underwear and bleached blonde hair. Jennifer Coolidge called him "one of the most unpredictable people I've ever met," adding, "You can't really get a take on him because he's like this chameleon."
• The stranger in his own photos: "I don't belong here." "I'm garbage." "I don't want to be this f---ing loser who just dates people." And to Theo Von: "Everybody's always like, 'Oh, that guy just has an I don't give a f--- attitude.' I'm like, no, I'm miserable. I want to be that dude too. I don't even know that guy. I look at pictures and I'm like, 'Who is this guy that everybody's talking about?' It's not me."
• People-pleasing as survival: "It was like 25 years of people-pleasing and that's why I live," he told Theo Von. "We're people pleasers. 'Laugh at me, please.' Watch my movie. When I go outside, take a picture."
• The daily anesthetic: Daily marijuana use from age 16 to 23 that eventually caused psychosis. Ketamine every day for four years. "Why would you not do it every day?" he told Maron. "Why not?"
• Allergic to calm: "I'm so afraid to be happy. Because it's uncomfortable," Pete told Theo Von. And to Bernthal: "It's weird being happy. I was at home the other day, and I was talking to my girl and my friends, and I was like, 'I feel weird. Like something's wrong.' And they're like, 'What?' I'm like, 'Nothing's wrong.'" He described crying on the floor of his new apartment because he couldn't get the TV to work: "I have everything and nothing. I have everything and nothing. And that's what it's like."
• The desire for peace: His text to Kanye during the Kardashian drama: "I want everything to be smooth." His decision to step back from Hollywood entirely: "I'm happy where I am right now, mentally."

But the peacekeeping misses something.

Nines sit in the Enneagram's gut triad — the same triad as Eights and Ones. Their shared currency is anger. Eights weaponize it. Ones channel it into moral standards. Nines fall asleep to it.

The anger doesn't disappear. It loses its address.

Look at Pete's history through this lens. The pool at eight. The hair-pulling until he was bald. The cutting that continued for two decades. The head-banging against walls. None of it looks like anger. All of it is. When a seven-year-old can't direct fury at God or al-Qaeda or the universe that swallowed his father, the fury turns inward and wears the costume of self-destruction.

Remember the Volcano Room at America's Camp? A room full of punching bags, "sold out till Thursday." Two hundred grieving children, and the most popular activity was breaking things. Anger was the main event. It just needed permission to come out.

The 9w8: The Furnace Beneath the Floorboards

Pete is specifically a Nine with an Eight wing. That wing gives him an edge that pure Nines don't always have — it explains why his comedy can turn sharp, why Bill Burr considered him "a peer" rather than a pushover, and why the Kanye West conflict became the most revealing public episode of Pete's personality.

Before Kanye, the Eight wing had already surfaced in private. Pete told Maron in 2017 about the blind rages that led to his BPD diagnosis, episodes where he would "freak out. Like, rage. Rage. Like stuff. And then not remember what happened after." His girlfriend at the time told him, "Something, you snapped." He described coming to after these episodes the way someone describes waking from a blackout, piecing things together from broken objects and fog.

The Kanye timeline put this dynamic on a public stage. In early 2022, Kanye spent months publicly harassing Pete over his relationship with Kim Kardashian. He released a song threatening to "beat Pete Davidson's ass." He dubbed Pete "Skete" on Instagram. He released an animated music video depicting himself kidnapping and burying a Pete-like figure.

Pete's initial response was pure Nine. He tried to make peace. He texted Kanye directly: "Yo it's Skete." He complimented Kim's parenting. He said he'd never get in the way of the children. He offered to hash things out "privately, one on one." He wrote: "I want everything to be smooth."

Then Kanye asked where Pete was.

"In your wife's bed," Pete replied.

And: "But if you continue to press me like you have for the past 6 months I'm gonna stop being nice."

That's the Eight wing. 9w8s absorb an extraordinary amount of conflict before reacting. They joke, deflect, accommodate, merge. But there's a line, and once crossed, the response isn't diplomatic. It's blunt, aggressive, and startling compared to their usual easygoing nature. Pete went from peacemaker to provocateur in a single text message.

The Eight wing also surfaces in his comedy when he shifts from self-deprecation to something sharper. His SNL parody of Joe Rogan had real teeth: "I used to host Fear Factor and now doctors fear me." When he needs to, Pete can hit hard. He usually chooses not to.

The Relationship Pattern

The question everyone asks about Pete Davidson's dating life is "how?" How does this guy date Ariana Grande, Kate Beckinsale, and Kim Kardashian?

Pete put it in perspective on Real Ones: "I've been in show business for half my life, almost like 14, 15 years, on a national TV show. And in 12 years I've dated like 10 people. I don't really think that's that crazy." He described meeting people at work, at "one of the five Hollywood epicenters where you meet people," and having no control over a paparazzi guy "trying to feed his family, trying to snag a pic."

The more interesting question is what pattern runs through all of them.

With Grande, he got matching tattoos within weeks. A Dangerous Woman bunny ear behind his ear. "Mille Tendresse," a million tendernesses. When it ended, he covered one of the tattoos with the word "CURSED."

With Kardashian, he transformed physically. Bleached hair, designer wardrobe, stepping into her world of paparazzi and brand deals like he'd always been there.

Each relationship followed the same arc: total immersion, rapid identity absorption, and then, when the connection broke, a period of recalibrating who he was without that person's gravity to orbit around.

Pete could name the psychology behind it with clinical precision. He told Theo Von about the BPD-driven pattern of self-sabotage: "Sometimes you want to make your outside match how you feel on the inside. Everybody left me so long ago in my mind that I want, if you're even still around here, it makes me not even respect you, in a sick way."

He described calling bluffs, pushing people away to test whether they'd leave. "Anybody that's ever loved me or cared about me has gotten the worst wrath from me."

On WTF, he described the manipulative conversational loops: engineering conversations to get specific reassurances, then disbelieving those reassurances, creating exhausting cycles for partners. "You don't love me." "Of course I do." "No, I know something's up." And when they finally broke down: "Okay, I see. I knew it."

The Enneagram maps this spiral. When Nines lose their footing, they swing toward the anxiety and suspicion of Type Six. The man whose default is "OK, cool" becomes the person who can't stop scanning for betrayal. Pete described it himself: engineer a reassurance, disbelieve it, treat the breakdown as proof. It's the opposite of the Nine's natural state — instead of falling asleep to the threat, he couldn't stop seeing threats everywhere.

Then came the cultural moment he never wanted. In 2018, a comment from Grande about Pete's anatomy went viral as "Big Dick Energy," a meme that consumed the internet and reduced him to a punchline. "No one talked about any work I was doing," he said. "That hurt so much."

Pete named the broader pattern himself in a 2024 W Magazine interview: "I don't want to be this f---ing loser who dates people." When the interviewer pushed back, he replied: "Thank you very much! Because that voice was loud in my head for a while."

The King of Staten Island

Pete has always been tied to Staten Island, as both origin and albatross. He described it to Maron with the bluntness of someone who'd earned the right: "It's a terrible place, Marc. Everybody thinks I'm joking." He called it the only red borough in New York, full of "people who peaked in high school" carrying "this 17-year-old macho reality" through adulthood. He'd never visited Manhattan until he was fourteen.

But the place also shaped him. His dad's firehouse across the bridge in Brooklyn Heights, his mom's hospital shifts, the ferry rides to Manhattan for open mics that became his escape route. Staten Island was the thing he had to leave and the thing he couldn't stop writing about.

In 2020, Pete co-wrote a film with Judd Apatow and Dave Sirus that asked a question he'd been circling his whole career: what if he'd never found comedy?

The King of Staten Island is a semi-autobiographical black comedy about a young stoner named Scott (Pete's father's name) who is stuck. Numbed out, directionless, unable to process his firefighter father's death years earlier. The plot kicks into gear when his mother starts dating a new firefighter, forcing Scott to confront the grief he's been burying under weed and tattoo ink.

What makes the film significant for understanding Pete's psychology is what he chose to fictionalize. In real life, Pete found comedy and SNL. In the film, his character has no outlet. No stage, no audience, no way to transmute pain into laughter. He's a Nine with nothing to wake him up, drifting through life in the numbed-out haze that Nines fall into when they've fully checked out.

Bill Burr, who played the new boyfriend in the film, came away with an impression that contradicted Pete's public image: "He's not a slacker. He is very professional and hard-working. He was always the first guy there and the last guy to leave." Burr added: "He was somebody that I quickly considered a peer. He was wise beyond his years."

There's a movie Pete loves even more than his own. Frequency (2000), a film about a man who discovers a radio that lets him talk to his dead fireman father across time. They solve a crime together. The father comes back. "It's the Pete Davidson fantasy," he told Theo Von.

His grandmother gave him the VHS six months after his father died. He was eight. "I was like, 'Why would you give this to me?'" He still browses eBay for working CB radios. Not project radios. Working ones.

The Darkest Night

The crisis of December 2018 didn't come from nowhere. Pete had been struggling since childhood.

The suicidal ideation that began at eight, when his mother pulled him from the pool, had never fully left. By his early twenties, the blind rages and blackouts had a clinical name: borderline personality disorder. He'd also been self-harming since childhood. Cutting. Banging his head against walls when he couldn't handle an emotion. "Hoping I would pass out because I didn't want to be in that situation," he told Bernthal. That continued until roughly 2023.

He'd started getting tattoos on his chest to cover up the scars from cutting. The roughly 200 designs on his body weren't impulsive. They were a second skin layered over evidence of pain.

In December 2018, Pete posted to Instagram: "I'm doing my best to stay here for you but I actually don't know how much longer I can last. All I've ever tried to do was help people. Just remember I told you so."

Then he deleted his account.

The NYPD conducted a welfare check. Ariana Grande rushed to 30 Rock. Machine Gun Kelly got on a plane. The whole thing played out in real time on social media while Pete was backstage at SNL.

He was deep in substance use. Weed daily, ketamine for years. "I was a daily, all day sorta guy and I got psychosis where you hear voices, and you feel like you're sitting next to yourself," he later explained on The Breakfast Club. "Weed isn't supposed to do that... it's because it's too strong."

His mother Amy called him while he was in rehab. She said the words that would eventually save him:

"My biggest fear is that I will turn on the news and I'll see that my son has died."

She's a nurse from Staten Island who met his father in grammar school, never dated after he died, and raised Pete and his sister alone. When Pete asked her about dating years later, she said, "Nah, your dad was my guy." That's who was on the other end of the phone.

"That killed me," Pete told Theo Von on This Past Weekend. "So I was like, 'Alright, can't die until she's dead, at least.' When that lady says that to you, I would have to be a heartless sociopath to not get my shit together."

Dark humor as a bridge over unbearable pain. The admission that he stayed alive not because he wanted to, but because someone else needed him to. A Nine's deepest instinct: existing for others, even when you can't find a reason to exist for yourself.

The Long Road Back

Recovery wasn't a single decision. It was a series of them, spread across years.

Pete told Theo Von about the moment the pattern broke: "A year and a half ago, I was like, I need to want to be okay. If I'm going to do this, it can't be for standup. It can't be for this movie. It can't be for this girl. It can't even be for my family. I have to want to be okay. Otherwise, all this shit doesn't work."

That line separates Nine-style survival, existing because others need you to, from actual recovery. Pete had spent his life finding external reasons to stay: comedy, relationships, his mother's fear. For the first time, he was trying to find an internal one.

The tools were specific. He credited the DBT workbook to Bernthal, dialectical behavior therapy, which teaches replacement behaviors for self-harm. "Okay, you want to cut right now? Go take a cold shower. Listen to your favorite song. Call your friend. Do anything. Because that feeling, most of the time, goes away after like 15, 20 minutes."

He described a technique for managing BPD-driven distrust: "Has this person fucked you over in any way? Has this person lied to you? Has this person ever been anything but solid? You got to fact-check yourself. And if the facts check out, you can't let yourself think that way."

He told Theo Von about his approach to tabloid coverage: putting someone else's name in the headline to test whether it mattered. "'Hugh Jackman, so-and-so,' I'm like, oh, I don't give a shit. But when it's you, you're like, everybody's reading this." Nobody reads it, he realized. "You're like a bus driver. They want to see you do the thing they like that you do."

He checked into rehab again in 2023, this time not in crisis but proactively, seeking treatment for PTSD and borderline personality disorder. In June 2024, he checked into a wellness center again. These weren't rock-bottom moments but deliberate pauses. A man who had learned the hard way that his mental health required ongoing attention, not one-time fixes.

He attended multiple recovery groups, including SLAA (Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous), addressing what he called "intimacy disorder" and "connectivity disorder." He gravitated toward older friends: Joey Gay, his touring companion since he was 18, is in his 50s. Most of Pete's close friends are 40 and up. "I think that makes me feel safe," he told Theo Von. "There's some form of big brother thing. Somebody looking out for you."

A seven-year-old who lost his father, still searching for that presence in every room.

The friendships Pete built are specific and earned. He met his best friend Alex at an Arlington Drafthouse meet-and-greet. Alex was eighteen or nineteen, didn't ask for a picture, and handed Pete a rare Sopranos snow globe he'd stolen from his dad. "I figured you would like it," Alex said. Pete told Bernthal: "Now he could ruin my life with a press of a button, and I trust him with everything."

He met Simon Rex on the Happy Madison lot and connected over basketball. Machine Gun Kelly got on a plane the night Pete posted his suicidal Instagram message. These aren't celebrity friendships. They're the kind built by a man who learned early that trust requires evidence.

And when Pete spirals, his friends don't disappear. "They come up, they're like, 'All right, man, let's figure this out. This is scary,'" he told Bernthal. "And they call me out, man. They're like, 'This ain't cool.' Or they call my mom."

By September 2024, he was maintaining full sobriety. "You can't go to therapy on a bunch of drugs and expedite it to work," he said. And on The Breakfast Club in 2025: "When you're doing drugs in your thirties, it's not cute."

His therapeutic goal, stated to Marc Maron in 2017, captured the Nine's deepest wish: "I would love to be okay, Marc. That would be incredible. To be okay? Incredible."

Scottie

In late 2025, Pete became a father. His daughter with Elsie Hewitt was named Scottie Rose.

"The second she came out, we were like, 'That's Scottie,'" Pete said. The name honors his father Scott. His dad's closest friends used to call him Scottie. It also follows the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition of naming children after deceased loved ones.

There's a double meaning Pete couldn't resist sharing: "She was conceived in Scotland."

He told Theo Von what fatherhood meant to him with a directness that cut through his usual deflection: "I get to be unselfish. I'm not the focal point of my life anymore. I'm so sick of myself. I'm exhausted."

That relief only makes sense through the Nine lens. Pete had spent decades trapped in a loop of self-focused suffering: addiction, therapy, tabloids, relationships, all orbiting around the question of who he was and whether he was okay. Fatherhood offered an exit from that orbit. Not another identity to absorb, but a reason to stop asking the question altogether.

"I've always had anxiety about people pleasing and wanting to be the best at everything," he told Elite Daily. "But now I'm like, 'If I could do that, that'd be cool. But if not, I get to hang out with Scottie.'"

On This Past Weekend, he talked about his father with a gentleness that didn't try to be funny: "My memories are few and far between because I was seven but I remember laughing a lot and him being jacked and smoking a lot of cigarettes and driving a Subaru Impreza." He called his dad "f---ing hilarious." He said people who knew Scott always have the same tell, "this big smile and their eyes kind of light up and they call him Scotty, which is what his friends called him."

His mother Amy was "starved for a grandchild," he told Theo Von, already talking to Elsie's belly, calling herself Mimi. Pete felt the weight of what she'd given up: "I feel guilty about my mom giving up dating and having a life in general to raise me and my sister alone."

The woman who'd never dated again after losing Scott, who'd worked hospital shifts while raising two grieving children on Staten Island, was about to meet the granddaughter named after the man she'd never stopped loving.

The man who named his daughter after his dead father was choosing presence over retreat.

Pete Davidson's Quiet Reinvention

The Pete Davidson of 2026 looks different from the tabloid fixture of five years ago. He hosts The Pete Davidson Show on Netflix, a weekly podcast filmed from his garage with friends like Machine Gun Kelly (whom he calls by his real name, Colson). He has multiple films in production: Killing Satoshi, a Bitcoin conspiracy thriller with Doug Liman and Casey Affleck, and That Time We Met, a rom-com with Ella Purnell.

But the project that signals the real shift is his Peacock series, a show Pete co-wrote with Judah Miller and Dave Sirus, starring Edie Falco as his mother and Joe Pesci as his grandfather. Pesci hadn't worked in roughly thirty years.

When the original lead actor bailed a month before shooting, Lorne Michaels called Pete and said two words: "What about Pesci?" Pete was skeptical. "The guy hasn't worked in 30 years. He famously hates working and probably hates people like me." But Michaels told him: "All actors are waiting for is a good part."

Pesci read the material, agreed to a meeting, and signed on. Pete told Bernthal that Pesci "changed my life. And he saved my life." The validation arrived at the exact moment Pete needed it most: "When you're going online and you're like, I can deal with trolls. But Oscar winners? Presidents? You're like, 'Damn, I'm a loser.' And then you're like, 'I got the guy no one could get.'"

It's the first project Pete has been proud of. "I've never said this about anything I've ever been in," he told Bernthal, "but this one, it's the first time I've ever been like, 'Yo, you see that?'" He described the set as egoless, "best joke wins, best take wins, whoever's idea is best wins," staffed entirely with friends. A man who spent his career calling himself garbage finally made something he doesn't want to apologize for.

There's a version of Pete Davidson that never gets here. The version that keeps drifting, keeps absorbing other people's gravity, keeps asking to be fired from his own life. What changed wasn't just sobriety or therapy — it was direction. He co-wrote the show. He fought for Pesci. He built a set where the best idea wins. For the first time, Pete wasn't orbiting someone else's world. He was building his own and standing behind it.

In Enneagram terms, this is what happens when a Nine wakes up — they move toward the focused, purposeful energy of a healthy Three. Not the shapeshifter chasing validation, but the person who discovers what they actually want and goes after it. Pete probably wouldn't use that language. He'd just say he finally got tired of being sick of himself.

He's off social media entirely. "We live in a doom scrolling world where we're all trying to be what we think people want us to be," he told Variety, "and that's not a healthy way to live." He moved to a quieter life outside New York. He told W Magazine: "I just want to be known for doing good work. I want to be out there only when it's movie, stand-up, charity, or business ventures. That's when I want to be seen."

On The Breakfast Club in 2025, Pete said he hopes that in 20 years, people will view his journey like Robert Downey Jr.'s, someone remembered for turning their life around. He admitted there were moments when the "expected headline" would have been his overdose.

Instead, he surprised everyone. Including himself.

Pete Davidson is still removing his tattoos. Thirty percent done. Another decade to go.

"There's no way to win the thing where everybody likes you," he told Theo Von. "It's all a trap. And they can smell it on you."

The man in the chair isn't erasing anymore. He's uncovering.

Disclaimer This analysis of Pete Davidson's Enneagram type is speculative, based on publicly available information, and may not reflect the actual personality type of Pete.