The California Gubernatorial Race Just Got Weirder Now That Randy Quaid Has Said He’s Considering Running Too

A recall election vote for California Governor Gavin Newsom seems to be in the offing, with the campaign to replace him having recently come up with just enough signatures to put it on a ballot. Nothing is official yet, but already a cast of characters has stepped up to run as his possible successor. There’s Caitlyn Jenner, athlete-turned-reality TV star, as well as outspoken Republican. And now it looks like we may be getting a full-blown Trump fan: fallen actor Randy Quaid.

Quaid hasn’t been in a major movie in a very long time; his last prominent production was Milos Forman’s 2006 biopic Goya’s Ghosts. You might remember him stealing parts of Brokeback Mountain, some 16 years ago. But since then he’s fallen on hard times. He and his wife dropped out of Hollywood, made all manner of claims about persecution, even tried to escape to Canada. There was also a sex tape. Recently he’s been, shall we say, eccentric on Twitter. Late last year he even earned the social media acclaim of Donald J. Trump.

And now look at him. On Tuesday he tweeted that he was “seriously considering running for governor,” and that the “prosecutorial corruption in California (esp Santa Barbara & the Bell scandal) is rampant.” He also vowed to “clean up the District Attorney Offices throughout the state.”

To sum up, should California voters oust Gavin Newsom — who has been criticized for his handling of the pandemic, although conservatives have other beef to raise with him — their voices may wind up including Caitlyn Jenner and Randy Quaid. In the meantime, feel free to enjoy the latter’s truly remarkable screen work, not just his unhinged turns in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Independence Day, and Quick Change, but also The Last Detail, even Kingpin, in which he’s the good ol’ Amish boy calm at the center of a nutty storm. A pretty good actor, that Randy Quaid, back in simpler times.