Cynthia Nixon Has Already Won

By 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.

But instead of playing a politician, Cynthia Nixon has decided to become one, a choice many have found confounding. Who would trade all of this — the career, the apartment, the comfortable distance from reality — for glad-handing, and stale coffee in Styrofoam cups, and answering for a number of decades-old Sex and the City grievances, and, you know, Albany? “People were like, ‘I think it’s great, but just why?’ ” Nixon said onstage at the Cutting Room in Murray Hill, at her recent 52nd-birthday party, which doubled as a fund-raiser. “Why would you possibly do this?” 

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Source: New York Magazine (via Empire Report New York)