Pete Davidson Tells Seth Meyers Why He "Teared Up" Rewatching His SNL Audition
The Dog Man star and Seth Meyers will reunite for SNL50: The Anniversary Show on February 16.
Looking back at your Saturday Night Live days can be an emotional experience — just ask Pete Davidson.
Davidson, an SNL cast member from 2014-2022, stopped by Late Night with Seth Meyers to discuss voicing the villainous Petey the Cat in the new hit movie, Dog Man. And with the SNL Season 50 celebrations in full swing, Seth Meyers revealed that they'll both be at February 16's three-hour live special — and asked Davidson about his audition at just 20 years old.
"There's a lot of really great SNL documentaries, around the 50th, and you're in maybe my favorite one, which is about the audition process," Meyers told Davidson, referring to the first episode of Peacock's Beyond Saturday Night docuseries. "I, of course, acutely remember how trippy it was to audition for SNL. They showed your audition, you talked about watching it."
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Meyers shared a picture of Davidson from his 2014 audition, which featured the baby-faced comic standing on the Studio 8H stage wearing jeans and a Spider-Man t-shirt.
"Well, I've explained there's no one in there. You're on the stage, the SNL stage, and Lorne [Michaels] is there, [Steve] Higgins, and maybe one or two other people, but they're blacked out. You can't see them," recalled Davidson. "So, you're doing your whole act to no one. And once in a while, you'll hear like, 'Heh!' And that's about all I got."
The King of Staten Island star asked Meyers if he got "choked up" watching his own audition, but "I more felt like my my entire stomach fell out of my body. Because I felt all the stress again," confessed Meyers.
Pete Davidson auditioned for SNL at 20 years old
"I teared up a little bit because, I'm like, you know, 20 there. So it's before, like, all the bad stuff happens," Davidson said, eliciting a sympathetic response from the audience. "That was supposed to be a joke," he laughed.
"The fact that you were 20, like, that's insane," Meyers noted.
Meyers also asked Davidson about what was behind his superhero fashion choice for the audition, to which Davdison replied, "I still do this. You can go to Target and get ten of the coolest t-shirts ever for 20 bucks. That was one of them."
"Was your hope that, like, if Lorne had forgotten your name, he'd be like, 'I like Spider-Man,'" Meyers joked, doing his Michaels impression.
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Pete Davidson rewatched his SNL audition for Peacock's Beyond Saturday Night
"Five Minutes," the first episode of Peacock's four-part Beyond Saturday Night docuseries, gives fans a peek into the audition process. In it, past and present cast members, including Davidson, watching their original auditions.
"It's wild to see the hope in one's eye. I didn't know whether to do impressions or standup," said Davidson while watching his audition in Beyond Saturday Night. "I called my buddy and I was like, 'Should I do impressions?' And he was like, 'Can you?' and I was like, 'No.' And he was like, 'You should do standup.'"
"Maybe two times in six minutes someone just went 'Ha!'" Davidson remembered. "I was like that was terrible there's no way I'm getting it."
As Meyers put it in his interview with Davidson, "And then you find out afterwards: Hey, you know the hardest you bombed in your life? You made it!"
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