AUSTIN (Texas) • American actor and author Matthew McConaughey announced on Sunday that he would not run for governor of Texas for now, after months of weighing whether he would seek the office.

In a video posted on Twitter and Instagram, McConaughey, 52, said running for governor is a "humbling and inspiring path to ponder".

"It is also a path that I'm choosing not to take at this moment," he said.

His announcement came about two weeks before the candidate filing deadline for the Texas primary, and about two weeks after Mr Beto O'Rourke, a former El Paso congressman and last year's Democratic presidential candidate, announced his run for the office against Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican.

Instead of running for governor, McConaughey said, he would continue to support entrepreneurs, businesses and foundations that are "leaders", establishments that are "creating pathways for people to succeed in life", and "organisations that have a mission to serve and build trust, while also generating prosperity".

"That's the American dream," he said.

"And politicians? The good ones can help us get to where we need to go. Yeah, but let's be clear: They can't do anything for us unless we choose to do for ourselves."

Asked about whether he would run for governor in an interview last month on The New York Times podcast Sway, McConaughey said he was learning more about politics and measuring whether politics is "an embassy for me to be of the most use to myself, to my family, to the most amount of people in my life moving forward".

"I like to measure things before I partake," he said on the podcast. "And you've got to partake before you've partaken."

McConaughey is known for his roles in the movies Interstellar (2014), The Wolf Of Wall Street (2013) and Dallas Buyers Club (2013), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 2014.

Last year, he published a memoir, Greenlights.

NYTIMES