Kim Kardashian is sharing new details about how she and Pete Davidson got together.
They’re now at the stage in their relationship where he’s met at least some of her children, whom she shares with ex-husband Kanye West, but The Kardashians star talks about the beginnings, including how he asked around for her number even before she guest-hosted Saturday Night Live. She also reveals he asked her directly for digits at the Met Gala in September, but, alas, fashion got in the way.
Kardashian hung out with Davidson in 2019 when she and then-husband West had dinner with him for Kid Cudi’s birthday in 2019. Then at some point after she filed for divorce from West, in February 2021, Davidson tried to connect with her.
“He had been asking around for my number a little bit and everyone wasn’t really sure, like, is she going through a divorce?” Kardashian said on the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast. “He just wanted to wait a little bit.”
They connected at the Met Gala on Sept. 13. Her SNL hosting gig hadn’t yet been announced, but he knew it was happening, so he came over to whisper about it.
“He came up to me and we were talking about SNL, and I was like, ‘They better hurry up and announce it … [so I don’t] back out,” because she was feeling so “nervous,” she said.
Kardashian said Davidson gave “good advice” about hosting on Oct. 10, adding, “‘Hey, take my number. If you, if you need anything.'” However, “I had gloves on and I couldn’t get in my phone with the gloves,” she said. “He was like, ‘Alright cool’ and he like walked away, but I was going to be like, ‘Oh, but take my [number]…” So we never connected.”
They didn’t even really connect at SNL, she said, despite their on-camera kiss in the Aladdin sketch.
“He was the one cast member that wouldn’t sign off to be filmed,” for her Hulu show, she said. “He wasn’t there until the day of [the live show], so I didn’t see him all week during rehearsals… We did one dress rehearsal … and then the real thing. The whole time when I was rehearsing, it was like with a stand-in.”
Asked if she saw the “BDE energy” everyone talks about it, she said she “was not even focused on that,” instead she was worried about being funny on a show she had never watched a full episode of and delivering her monologue that comedian Michelle Wolf helped her write.
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“Then when when we kissed, I was just like, ‘Mmm.’ It was a stage kiss, but it was still a little zing. It wasn’t … a super crazy feeling. I was just like, ‘Hmm.’ And then I was like, ‘Wow, I really haven’t kissed anyone else in 10 years, so maybe I’m just like being stupid and it’s just nothing and it’s just a stage kiss.”
Davidson never came to the SNL after-party. “The only person who did not come,” she recalled, though said she didn’t think about it at the time — only in hindsight.
A few days after hosting — and the stage kiss — she was thinking back and was like, “Hmm, there is some BDE action. I just gotta get myself out there” post-divorce.
Kardashian set the record straight about her first date with Davidson, saying it wasn’t the night they were photographed holding hands at Knott’s Berry Farm just before Halloween.
“No, no,” she replied. “We privately hung out first” at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “I don’t think our first date to even if we liked each other would be so public.”
Kardashian talked up the ups, but also the downs — her divorce from West, with whom she shares four children. Last month, Kardashian was declared legally single as they continue to hash out their finances, a complicated matter as they’re both in the billionaires club. That came after West made a very public and aggressive play to win her back.
While Kardashian said she and West “don’t really communicate” at this point, though they both recently attended son Saint’s soccer game, “we will” get there” because “we have so much love for each other. We really do. We’re always family… We love our kids, and we both love the time we spent together. We’ll … always cherish that.”
For her, it helps to focus on “positive times” and be appreciative for all he’s given her.
“I have so much love and respect for him and who he’s been in my life and what he’s brought to me and our amazing kids,” she said. “He’s changed my life” by helping her step into the fashion world.
This isn’t the only period that they’ve struggled with communication. Kardashian admitted they went “eight months without even speaking to each other” initially after the divorce, making it clear that he still saw the kids at that time. She explained that they “took a minute of not talking” to figure out their new relationship as co-parents. They got a lot closer with Kardashian attending his listening party in a wedding dress in August and West accompanying her to SNL in October. Then she started dating Davidson, whom West publicly called “Skete” in a months-long social media attack against the comedian.
Kardashian said just “because [West] expressed himself in a certain way” doesn’t mean “he’s not an amazing person,” an “amazing friend” and “amazing dad, “adding, “I do believe that we’ll have that [friendship] again. I’m always really hopeful … I know who he is inside.”
And while it isn’t always easy, “especially behind closed doors,” she feels “so empowered in the way that I react to things now, and the way that I choose to communicate back. At the end of the day, what is it going to do if people are fighting back and forth?”
She also spoke about the “external beef” of their fanbases fighting — as West attacked Kardashian and Davidson on Instagram last month — saying it didn’t help.
“He has such a supportive and amazing, strong fanbase,” she said. But “just because people aren’t together anymore doesn’t mean that now those people have to not like me and my fanbase doesn’t have to not like him … There shouldn’t be all this like external beef. It’s hard enough already for families to go through a divorce — and then especially in the public eye. Then these fanbases get involved… It’s like: Let’s just be happy for everyone … It was so wild to me just to see people chime in.”
She added that she’s hopeful “that at some point it’s going to be all good again” between them, “so there’s no need [for fans] to get involved because there’s so much love.”
Plus, she said, “I am a grownup. I can handle this. I will handle this. Hopefully as privately as possible — with him.”
