When he’s not taking part in Zoom calls with his fellow University of Texas at Austin professors or giving online commencement speeches, Matthew McConaughey has been spending his stretch of self-isolation spreading a message of “safety first” amid the coronavirus pandemic. Channeling the character “Bobby Bandito,” the Oscar winner has urged fans to stay at home and wear face masks in a series of PSAs he’s posted on social media.
And while the process of reopening and the pressure to wear masks in public has sparked some heated political debates, McConaughey tells CBS Sunday Morning that his cautious take has nothing to do with his personal political views.
“It’s about us. It’s not about politics,” McConaughey said in a report on the CBS talk show on Sunday. “The narrative started to feel like, ‘Well, if you wanna go to work, you’re on the far right. And if you wanna stay home, you’re on the far left.’ And that’s just not true.
“Virus doesn’t give a damn who you voted for, or I voted for, you know?” he added. “And we shouldn’t care about that right now.”
The actor — who has also partnered with Lincoln to provide rural hospital workers with face masks — did admit hearing from people who had considered following stay-at-home guidelines to be “defeatist.”
“I had quite a few people come, you know, chest puffed up, and go: ‘I didn’t think of it that way, you know? I didn’t think of it being a strong choice; I thought of it as a defeatist move to stay in. And now I understand that this is a different kind of enemy that I’m here to battle,’” he shared.
“If I could be another voice to put that out and somebody else could go, ‘Oh, I didn’t listen to so-and-so, but I like that McConaughey told me,’ that’s a win! And that’s better for them, that’s better for me, that’s better for all of us.”
This article was originally published on yahoo.com/entertainment/.
