LOS ANGELES: Hollywood liberal Alec Baldwin said on Tuesday that he was “very, very interested” in running for political office, but was not planning to give up his day job anytime soon.
The actor, who plays a right-wing media executive on the sitcom 30 Rock, has expressed political aspirations before, but his discussion with talk show host Eliot Spitzer on CNN's Parker Spitzer seemed to advance his position.
“Yes, it's something that I'm very, very interested in,” Baldwin, 52, replied when Spitzer asked if politics was a “game” he wanted to enter.
But Baldwin hedged his statement by saying that he was just beginning to better understand the craft of acting: “To quit now when it really feels good and doing it feels good would be an enormously difficult thing to do… However, I do believe that people want to believe that someone who deeply cares about the middle-class...would like to seek public office.”
CNN released a transcript and video of the interview, which will air on Parker Spitzer on Wednesday and Thursday. Baldwin noted that all four of the U.S. presidents after Ronald Reagan were educated in Ivy League schools.
“What's missing is ...people who have not lost sight of what the middle-class in this country needs,” said Baldwin, who was raised in suburban New York by parents who were teachers. He went on to attend George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and later New York University, neither of which are Ivy League schools like Harvard or Yale.
While he has achieved wealth and fame through such movies as The Hunt for Red October and his Emmy-winning stint on 30 Rock, Baldwin told Spitzer he still went to work everyday like any other person and that “whatever I've accrued hasn't changed me as a person.”
His CNN interview is not the first time he has talked of a political career. On 60 Minutes in 2008, he said there were many things ahead for him besides acting. “I'm going to 50,” Baldwin said at the time. “There's no age limit on running for office, to a degree. [It is] something I might do one day.”