Andy ‘savvy’
Nixon:Hefeltheatongaynups,finallygotitdone
ALBANY — While actress Cynthia Nixon continues to hammer Gov. Cuomo as a fake Democrat, she did manage in a new magazine interview to give him grudging props over his successful push to legalize gay marriage.
Cuomo “had a lot of big Republican donors who wanted the marriage issue to go away because they thought it was making the party look bad,” Nixon says in a five-page New York magazine story that was released online late Sunday. “And it was getting embarrassing — Iowa had marriage equality and not New York.”
She conceded that “I think he spent political capital on it, and I think he was very savvy about the way he did it.”
Nixon married Christine Marinoni about a year after the 2011 same-sex marriage law passed. The two have a son together and Nixon, 52, has two older kids from a previous relationship.
The “Sex and the City” actress — who at the time the same-sex marriage law passed effusively praised Cuomo’s efforts on the issue — is now challenging the governor in the Democratic primary this year.
Nixon acknowledged to the magazine in its profile of her that Marinoni was nervous when she made her decision to enter the governor’s race. It was a determination Nixon made in part as a response to the election of President Trump.
Talking directly to Marinoni, Nixon said: “I remember we were in bed, and you turned to me and you were like, ‘Oh my God, you’re going to run. You’re going to run. Oh my God.’ ” Marinoni responded that “This is obviously a very difficult and challenging thing to take on. And I did not want to have been responsible.” But Marinoni is past the shock and onboard now. Nixon called the campaign “exciting,” and her wife agreed. A longtime advocate for prochoice rights, Nixon said her mother, who died of breast cancer in 2013, once revealed to her that she had had an abortion. “My mother told me that she had an abortion, and that it was illegal and it was awful,” Nixon said. “I think it was very difficult for her to talk about. But it was important to her that I knew this.”
Nixon is a longtime friend of Mayor de Blasio, one of Cuomo’s chief political foes.
A de Blasio spokesman in the magazine story dismissed talk that the mayor was behind Nixon’s run.
“Mayor de Blasio has got nothing to do with Ms. Nixon’s candidacy,” the spokesman told the magazine.
The spokesman added that “the paranoia of those who think otherwise is a sexist underestimation of her independence.”
Nearly a month into the race, Nixon has already won the backing of a number of progressive groups, including an endorsement Saturday from the Working Families Party.
While polls show her badly trailing Cuomo, 60, she and her team have said they believe she can pull off an upset.