Cynthia Nixon Running For Governor May Seem Like A Parody Of A New York

By moving the Governor to the left and she’s beginning to think she just might win the whole thing

- Jessica Pressler

They say politics is Hollywood for ugly people, so it’s understandable that the question of why exactly Cynthia Nixon is running for governor of New York is one that keeps coming up. After all, Nixon has had the kind of career most actors dream about. The past two years saw her inhabiting complicated, interesting characters like Emily Dickinson and Nancy Reagan and taking home a Tony—her second—for the Broadway production of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. She could’ve kept going, agitating for her favored progressive causes while looking for the kind of part that would’ve netted her an Oscar, the last award she needs to get an egot.

And: “There actually was a part,” Nixon admitted recently, sitting on a barstool in her Noho kitchen on a weekday morning. It was playing a female politician, she said, and it was good, and although she declined to say who the character was, looking at her layered bob (several shades lighter than the red she’d had as Miranda on Sex and the City), intelligent blue eyes, button nose, and Cool Whip complexion, you wouldn’t have to be a genius casting director to figure it out.

“Blonde?” I asked. “Partial to pantsuits?”

Nixon pursed her lips in a mysterious smile that only served to emphasize that she’d have been an excellent Hillary Clinton.