Matthew McConaughey, candidate for office? It could be more likely than you think.
The actor spoke to ABC’s This Week about his new grant program to address school safety issues following last year’s mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where he was asked whether some of those issues could be solved from a political standpoint—and if he’d lead the charge.
“Could you see yourself running for something?” host Jonathan Karl asked.
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McConaughey floundered, noting that the question centered on which arena—the political or otherwise—did he find himself the most useful.
“There’s a great question that I’m still answering,” he said. “As of right now, to be a private citizen with my wife and to come up with an idea like the Greenlights Grant Initiative—to work with the government publicly to help them, not doing the job for them, helping them pull off what they set out to do in the first place—there is an argument that that’s more useful, what I’m doing right now, in a small way.”
McConaughey previously floated a run for Texas governor in 2021 after polls showed him with a lead against the incumbent Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. He ultimately decided against it, however, noting at the time that it wasn’t the right moment for him.
“It’s a humbling and inspiring path to ponder,” McConaughey said in a video posted to his account on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “It is also a path that I’m choosing not to take at this moment.”
Abbott won re-election last year against Democrat Beto O’Rourke.
McConaughey spoke to Karl about his Greenlights Grant Initiative, a platform designed to make it easier for schools to wade through government bureaucracy and access federal safety funds. He also hoped the program would help cut through the divisions surrounding gun control, which he said are too rooted in partisan extremes.
“No one wants to be controlled. But responsibility is still something that we can all go, ‘Yeah, I'll take responsibility,’” he said, later adding: “The Second Amendment defenders could talk responsibility. They could look you in the eye and talk responsibility with someone from the other side of the aisle.”
