Actor Matthew McConaughey is considering a run for Texas governor but said he won’t take the plunge unless he could use the position to “make real change.”
During a Thursday interview with the New York Times Opinion’s Sway podcast, McConaughey told interviewer Kara Swisher that he was “measuring” the idea of running for governor in 2022.
"Is that a place to make real change or is it a place where right now it's a fixed game, you go in there, you just put on a bunch of band-aids, in fours year you walk out and they rip them off and you're gone?" McConaughey said.
In September, responding to being asked about a potential run, the actor told Business Insider that while he was “measuring” the possibility he felt he was “more of a folk singin', philosopher, poet-statesman than I am a per-se definitive politician.”
“So I go, ‘Well that's a reason not to,' but then I go, 'Oh, well that's exactly why you should. Because politics needs redefinition,’” he said.
During the Sway interview, McConaughey described politics as a “broken business” ideologically and said that if politicians continued to put “preservation of party” over their constituents, he feared a civil war.
He also spoke about how he felt he could have more of an impact without becoming formally involved in politics.
"One side I'm arguing is 'McConaughey exactly, that's why you need to go get in there.’ The other side is 'that's a bag of rats man. Don't touch that with a ten foot pole. You have another lane. You have another category to have influence and get done things you'd like to get done and help how you think you can help and even heal divides,’” he said.
McConaughey described himself in the interview as a centrist.
“There is a sleeping giant right now. I think it's necessary to be aggressively centric to possibly salvage democracy in America right now."
While he said that Texas and the country was in bad shape at the moment, he said it was up to individuals to fix the problem.
“It's going to have to be a personal choice that more of us are going to have to make on our own and that collectively will build the army that's going to get us out of this not to just survive, but thrive,” he said.