--- title: "Pete Davidson Has Been Crushing Black Market Peptides to Get Disgustingly Swole" description: "Pete Davidson wasn't shy about how he put on a bunch of muscle: by crushing a bunch of gray market peptides." date: "2026-10-04" modified: "2026-10-04" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore.md" url: "https://futurism.com/health-medicine/pete-davidson-peptides" categories: - "Health & Medicine" - "Medical" --- # Pete Davidson Has Been Crushing Black Market Peptides to Get Disgustingly Swole ![A photo illustration of Pete Davidson and syringes.]() *David Becker/Getty Images for CinemaCon/Shutterstock/Futurism* There are few actors who would seem a more unlikely candidate to undergo a typical Hollywood style body transformation — complete with a press blitz with articles explaining their 4,000 calories per day diets and videos detailing their strangely convoluted workouts — than comedian Pete Davidson, who looks like he just rolled out the bed half the time. Still, whatever you may think about the guy, at least he's being candid about how he apparently put on fifteen pounds of muscle for his upcoming film "How to Rob a Bank": by absolutely crushing black market peptides. "I got on all the peptides that everyone's doing. They *work*," the 32-year-old [told *Variety*]() in an interview. The peptides, he said, are BPC-157 and Sermorelin, which he took while training around the clock and devouring tons of protein. "I just think it's really important for people to know that that's what I did," Davidson said. "When someone says, 'Whoa, you're in tremendous shape!' and an actor goes, 'Yup! Just broccoli, rice and chicken!,' it's like, 'No, dude, you have a fuckin' vein going from your forehead to your thumb.'" We can't say if Davidson himself has a vein going from his dome to digits. But what we can tell you is that the peptides he's taking are part of a massive grey area in biohacking that's undergoing a tremendous boom right now. These amino acids are typically injected, and are touted for their ability to help with everything from building muscle to losing weight to recovering from injuries, despite the science around them sometimes being iffy. Almost all these peptides [come from China](), where they're produced for cheap. The only thing more dubious than the quality and provenance of the peptides themselves are the online markets that sell them. Their legality is hazy, but they remain easy to buy online under the guise of "research use only." Technically, they aren't for human use at all. BPC-157 is one of the most popular peptides, and one of its biggest advocates is US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who's [vowed]() to make the stuff easier to get. It's often taken with another peptide called TB-500, which biohackers called the "Wolverine stack." A lot of people swear by them, and maybe they do work. But the thing with peptides is that you never know what you're getting, or what the long term effects will be. A recent *Wired* [investigation]() found that some supposed peptides being sold in stores weren't actually peptides. A sample of BPC-157, for example, was found to have no BPC-157. **More on peptides:** [*eBay Is Selling a Cornucopia of Russian Peptides*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()