Pete Davidson didn’t always know he’d be a cast member on Saturday Night Live. But being a dad? That was a role he felt called to from an early age.

“When I was young and my dad passed, I remember my mom used to be like, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ And I used to be like, ‘A dad,'” the SNL alum—whose firefighter father Scott Davidson died while responding to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001—shared on The Breakfast Club in 2025. “I always wanted to be a dad because I felt so crappy, and I wanted to make sure that a kid didn’t feel that way or have to go through what I went through.”

And when Davidson found out then-girlfriend Elsie Hewitt was pregnant, it brought back that same longing.

“It was so nice,” he continued. “Because you know when you’re little, you’re like, ‘I want to be an astronaut,’ or ‘I want to be’ whatever. A lot of that stuff fizzled out, but I felt the exact excitement when I was little.”