Who Is The Star In The Smartwater 'Get Smarter' Commercial?
Water brand Smartwater is running a funny new commercial touting the benefits of hydration. When you're dehydrated, you make questionable decisions, the ad jokingly posits, using the mistakes and misadventures of a certain heavily tattooed young man to make the point. It's funny if you don't recognize the guy, but it's even funnier if you do. "I've made a lot of questionable choices – and a couple of them need removing," the guy says, as a judgmental doctor works on removing one of his many tattoos. "Were all my bad decisions because I was dehydrated?" he wonders. "I mean, maybe. Definitely not."
He then runs down some of the questionable choices he's made — like the time he thought he got overconfident in thinking he was a model and walked out onto the runway in his own clothes. He lived in his mom's basement until he was in his late 20s, which he didn't even need to do. And there was the time he thought he was "too cool for walking" — but not too cool to wear a helmet — and crashed into a waiter while riding his hoverboard in a restaurant.
"But now I'm trying to make smarter choices," he says. "Hydrating with Smartwater and stuff like that." So who is this guy? He's Pete Davidson — comedian, "Saturday Night Live" cast member, and ex-fiancé of pop star Ariana Grande.
Pete Davidson really is losing his tattoos
Pete Davidson is famous for having more than 100 tattoos (via Body Art Guru), a sizable percentage of which are totally ridiculous, which is why he's in a Smartwater commercial about questionable decisions. He says he's in the process of getting his tattoos removed in real life right now, according to BuzzFeed. He's already gotten some of the most infamously bad ones removed or covered up; for example, he covered up "Jokes come and go, but swag is forever," which was written on his chest, with a shark.
He told Seth Meyers that when he got them, he didn't think he'd become a movie star, which he is now, with a filmography that includes the lead role in the semi-biographical comedy "The King of Staten Island" and a supporting role as Blackguard in "The Suicide Squad." And the process of getting tattoos covered up with makeup every day during filming is so tedious and time-consuming that he'd rather just not have the tattoos at all. He also said that the process of getting the tattoos removed is embarrassing, because when the doctor asks him if he wants to keep a given tattoo, he has to think about the choice he made to put that on his body. "I'll just be sitting there... and then all of a sudden I'll just hear, 'Are we keeping the Stewie Griffin smoking a blunt?'" he said. "And then I have to sit there and be like, 'No, Dr. G.'"
Davidson really did live in the basement of a house he shared with his mother after he split with Grande, and that is his real mother, Amy Waters, in the commercial with him. But he's since moved out into his own place that's still on Staten Island, according to Architectural Digest.