Colin Jost’s major purchase with his Saturday Night Live pal Pete Davidson was big news to his wife, Scarlett Johansson.
Jost, 43, revealed the text he received from the Oscar-nominated actress when he told her that he’d purchased the decommissioned Staten Island Ferry in 2022 with Davidson, 32, for $280,000. The “Weekend Update” anchor said he broke the news to Johansson, with whom he shares two children, via text: “Guess what? We own a ferry now.” Jost said Johansson texted him back just one word initially: “We?”
The longtime SNL writer shared his wife’s displeased reaction in a preview of an upcoming May 4 episode of the Smartless podcast.
Before Jost texted his wife, he first texted his father, a former New York City public school teacher. “He literally was like, ‘Did you do your homework?; Which is such a teacher thing to say,” Jost recalled. “I was like, ‘Dad, I’m just sort of texting you as a formality. I already bought the boat.”
Jost and Davidson, as part of a group of investors, bought the ferry after New York City put the John F. Kennedy up for auction. Davidson revealed more about their plans for it on Seth Meyers’ Family Trips With the Meyers Brothers podcast the following year.
“We just got all the plans built, and we had them do one of those computer-generated, show-you-what-it-could-be type-things, and now we’re out to a few people, and it seems like it’s all going well, but it’s definitely like five years away,” Davidson said then.
“We jokingly named it Titanic 2 on the LLC when we had to buy it,” he added. “It’s all going to stay the same—the same outside, we’re gonna keep what we can and just repurpose, make sure it’s nice, but it’ll be the Staten Island Ferry,” but with “a restaurant, there’ll be a concert venue, there’ll be a movie theater...and then there’s hotels in it, so we’ll have a couple of those, and then in the winter, tug it to Miami.”
Davidson said he hopes the project will be a success, since “we’re in the hole.”
Jost had called him, he told Meyers, and “He’s like, ‘Hey, can you hop on this call about the ferry?’ I was like, ‘We’re still doing that thing?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, this is pretty serious.’ And it is! I had no idea, I just saw a link and sent a deposit, and now I’m stuck with a f---in’ boat.”
Not long after that, Jost told People in 2024, “It is absolutely the dumbest and least thought-through purchase I’ve ever made in my life.”
But in the new podcast interview, Jost pushed back on claims that buying the boat was some “sort of crazy money pit.”
Jost told the Smartless hosts that he and Davidson have basically made back their investment already by “doing some events.”
One version of his vision includes having a “more middle-class, Manhattan swim club” on the ferry, with the other being along the lines of what Davidson described. “A home run for me is it’s a thing that could be used for an event space but also has an everyday purpose,” he said.
