Is Pete Davidson planning to leave Saturday Night Live soon? It’s definitely looking that way.
In a new video interview with Charlamagne Tha God, posted on Monday, February 24, the comedian, 26, admitted that he “personally thinks” he should leave the sketch show and has had “conversations” about it with several people.
“It’s a hard thing to do cause you don’t want to ever pull the trigger too early. But everybody’s always been like, ‘You’ll know when you know and it’ll be all right,'” Davidson said about the chats he’s had about exiting. “I personally think I should be done with that show because they make fun of me on it.”
He explained that even when he’s off filming a movie, there are still jokes about him. “It’s like, whose side are you on? You know, I have a weird feeling in that building where I don’t know whose team they’re playing for, really — If I’m the joke or I’m in on the joke.”
The Wild ‘N Out alum also shared that he wanted last year to be his last, but is still “trying to try to knock it away.” While he has a great relationship with creator Lorne Michaels — “he has treated me with nothing but love and he’s like a father figure to me,” Davidson noted — the show is “cutthroat” elsewhere.
“Everyone’s trying to get their s–t on. Everyone wants to be the next thing,” he explained. “So it’s not like a loving, care … Like you’re not going to get coddled over there. You know, they don’t give a f–k at the end of the day.”
Davidson joined the NBC series in 2014 after getting noticed on Guy Code, Wild ‘N Out and making an appearance on Brooklyn Nine-Nine. When Charlamagne, 41, asked him why he didn’t ask the writers and comedians not to make fun of his personal life (including his broken engagement to Ariana Grande and his high-profile relationships with Kate Beckinsale and Kaia Gerber), he admitted that he would then look like a hypocrite — and he’s told them that at the show.
“I literally was just like, ‘Picture what it’s like to be made fun of and then cut to immediately and then try to gain the audiences, like, get them on your side without them being like, ‘Look at this f–king idiot.’ Like you try to do that,” the King of Staten Island writer explained. “They think I’m f–king dumb. Like, I’m literally painted out to be like this big dumb idiot. Like, even all my sketches are just me being like, ‘OK, sure.’ … I think everybody outgrows it and I think for what I could do on the show — which is just barely anything and it’s just Weekend Update and I feel like I’ve done, like, 30 of those and I just feel like, yeah, I’ve done as much as I can over there but happy to be there as long as Lorne likes me.”
While he has multiple projects in the works — including the next Suicide Squad movie, set to hit theaters in 2021 — Davidson doesn’t want to be disrespectful to any of the people at NBC, although he admits it’s time to move on.
