Pete Davidson has spent most of his career looking unmistakably like Pete Davidson.

The tattoos. The close-cropped hair. The loose clothes. The dry expression that became familiar during eight seasons of Saturday Night Live.

That person is surprisingly difficult to find in the first images from his latest movie.

On the set of Tommy Karate, Davidson has been transformed with long dark hair, unusually bright blue eyes and facial prosthetics as he steps into the role of a real-life New York mob figure.

At first glance, it looks like another actor attempting an ambitious dramatic makeover.

But Tommy Karate is much more personal to Davidson than that.

He did not simply receive a script from a studio and accept the part.

Davidson helped write it.

He is producing it.

And by his own account, he spent more than three years trying to get the project made.

Now that cameras are finally rolling, he is calling it a “dream job.”

The New Pete Davidson Is Hard to Miss

Davidson was recently photographed filming Tommy Karate in Brooklyn, where his appearance was dramatically different from the one audiences normally associate with him.

His short hairstyle had been replaced by long, dark locks.

Colored contacts gave him striking blue eyes.

Facial prosthetics further altered the familiar shape of his face.

Combined with period clothing, the transformation made the 32-year-old comedian almost unrecognizable while shooting scenes for the upcoming crime film.

The physical changes are designed to turn Davidson into Thomas Pitera, the real man whose story inspired the movie.

And even the title sounds almost too cinematic to be true.

Pitera was known as “Tommy Karate.”

The nickname came from his intense interest in martial arts, an unusual characteristic that distinguished him from many of the other figures associated with New York organized crime.

But his story was considerably darker than the nickname might suggest.

Who Was the Real “Tommy Karate”?

Thomas Pitera became associated with New York’s Bonanno crime family and was known to law enforcement as both a mob figure and major drug trafficker.

His martial arts training became one of the defining details of his reputation.

Pitera was eventually arrested during a major federal investigation in 1990. Authorities accused him of operating a narcotics organization connected to serious violence in New York. He was later convicted on multiple murder counts and drug-related charges and sentenced to life in prison.

Over the years, investigators and authors have linked Pitera to far more killings than those for which he was convicted, with some accounts citing suspicions involving dozens of murders.

Those larger numbers remain allegations rather than convictions, an important distinction when telling the story of a real person.

The new film draws from Philip Carlo’s 2009 nonfiction book The Butcher: Anatomy of a Mafia Psychopath, which examined Pitera’s life and the investigation that ultimately brought him down.

But the movie is not expected to function solely as a portrait of the mobster.

It also follows the law enforcement effort to catch him.

Paul Walter Hauser Is Playing the Man Chasing Him

One of the film’s other key characters is DEA agent Jim Hunt.

Paul Walter Hauser, known for performances in projects including Richard Jewell and Black Bird, is playing Hunt, whose pursuit of Pitera provides the other side of the movie’s central conflict.

That makes Tommy Karate less of a traditional gangster rise-and-fall story and potentially more of a cat-and-mouse thriller.

Camila Mendes and Simon Rex are also among the cast.

Director Justin Chon, whose previous work includes Blue Bayou, is directing.

But Davidson is far more involved than audiences might expect.

He co-wrote the screenplay with Chon and Joseph Gay.

He is also serving as a producer.

That helps explain why his transformation feels different from the typical celebrity “look how different this actor looks” story.

Davidson has been trying to bring this particular film to the screen for years.

Davidson Says He Has Been Working on It for More Than Three Years

When the project was formally announced, Davidson made clear that Tommy Karate was already a long-running passion project.

“Tommy Karate is the greatest mob story never told,” Davidson said.

He added that he had been working on it for more than three years and was thrilled that production was finally moving forward.

That means the long hair, contacts and prosthetics are effectively the visible result of years of behind-the-scenes effort.

Davidson also described playing Pitera as a “dream job.”

That is notable because a dark true-crime drama is not necessarily the first project people would associate with the former SNL performer.

Davidson became famous through comedy.

Much of his public persona has also blurred the line between his real life and his fictional characters.

His 2020 movie The King of Staten Island, which he co-wrote with Judd Apatow and Dave Sirus, drew heavily from Davidson’s own experiences.

His Peacock series Bupkis similarly used an exaggerated version of his life as its foundation.

Tommy Karate asks him to do almost the opposite.

Instead of using Pete Davidson’s recognizable identity as the selling point, the movie is trying to make that identity disappear.

Davidson Has Admitted Dramatic Acting Can Feel Awkward

The project is also interesting because Davidson has been candid about his relationship with acting.

He has previously joked about how uncomfortable serious acting can feel for someone whose instincts were developed through stand-up comedy.

For a comedian, deliberately creating an intense emotional moment can sometimes feel ridiculous once the self-consciousness kicks in.

That has not stopped Davidson from increasingly choosing roles that push beyond straightforward comedy.

He has appeared in Bodies Bodies Bodies, The Suicide Squad and other films that allowed him to play with the audience’s expectations of his persona.

Tommy Karate may be his biggest attempt yet to break away from it.

The challenge is not simply looking different.

Davidson has to convince viewers that the familiar comedian beneath the prosthetics can disappear into someone far more threatening.

Director Justin Chon appears confident that he can.

Chon said the filmmaking team wants to approach the gangster genre through a contemporary lens rather than simply recreate the nostalgic style of classic mob films.

“This isn’t nostalgia,” Chon said when the project was announced. “It’s a reinvention.”

His Transformation Has Already Become Part of the Story

Even before audiences have seen footage from the movie, Davidson’s physical transformation is generating attention.

Recent photographs from the set show how committed the production is to separating him visually from his everyday image.

One version of the look features longer, slicked-back hair.

Other photos show a looser, center-parted style.

The blue contacts are especially noticeable because they dramatically change Davidson’s face before the prosthetic work is even considered.

It is an effective marketing image.

But knowing how long Davidson worked to reach this point makes the photographs more interesting.

They are not simply evidence that a makeup department gave an actor a makeover.

They are evidence that a project Davidson had been trying to make for more than three years is finally real enough for him to walk onto a Brooklyn street dressed as its central character.

This Was Never Just Another Role

Davidson could have waited for someone else to make a Tommy Pitera movie and auditioned for it.

Instead, he became one of the people responsible for creating the movie in the first place.

He helped shape the screenplay.

He attached himself as the star.

He became a producer.

He spent years pushing the project forward.

Then, when filming finally began, he allowed the movie to transform nearly everything audiences immediately recognize about him.

That may ultimately be the most revealing part of Tommy Karate.

Pete Davidson became famous by being himself — or at least a heightened version of himself — in front of millions of people.

For this movie, he spent three years fighting for the chance to become someone audiences might not recognize at all.

Now the hair is longer, the eyes are different and even his face has been altered.

The question is no longer whether Pete Davidson can look like Tommy Karate.

It is whether, once the movie begins, audiences will forget they are watching Pete Davidson entirely.