OS ANGELES - For what it's worth, no bull: Warren Beatty is thinking of running for president.
It is a role the actor, director, and former Hollywood Lothario has never been cast in before. He did play a senator unable to resist rapping the truth in last year's ''Bulworth,'' and his wife once starred as an environmental lobbyist who captured the president's heart.
But politics has always been a sideline, if a passionate one, for Beatty. Now the long-time Democratic activist and avowed liberal is weighing whether to take it center stage. He's that displeased with the national debate on campaign finance reform and other issues important to him.
''It's a surprise, but it's not a shock,'' said William Bradley, a Sacramento political analyst and friend of Beatty's who has heard him mull the idea of a candidacy of some sort for years. ''Could he win? I don't know. But I've been talking to him about it and I think it's possible.''
Few political observers give Beatty much of a chance, however, whether he goes up against Al Gore and Bill Bradley in the Democratic primary, or joins Jesse Ventura in the Reform Party - a possibility he has hinted at. Even Beatty has conceded there should be a better candidate than he. But he also has said he doesn't want to discount the friends and activists who are encouraging him to give it a go.
A Beatty candidacy, of course, would be the ultimate intersection of celebrity and politics. Unlike Ronald Reagan or even Sonny Bono, he never has held elected office. He never has been a candidate of any kind.
But he did campaign hard for Robert Kennedy and George McGovern some three decades ago and, more recently, for Gary Hart. And he knows how to tell and sell a story, although several of his more recent movies have done less than stellar business at the box office. He has the ability to make an increasingly apathetic America listen, at least for a while.
''I don't take this as a joke,'' said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political scientist at Claremont Graduate University. ''He wants to have a conversation with the country, and he has the bully pulpit of celebrity to do it.''
Although he has only hinted at political ambitions, Beatty is already attracting attention from voters as well as the news media.
Arianna Huffington, the syndicated newspaper columnist who first raised the talk of a Beatty candidacy this week, said she has been inundated with e-mails from potential Beatty supporters.
Many wanted to know where to send their $100, an amount that pollster and Beatty pal Pat Caddell suggested as an appropriate donation for individuals interested in funding a real grass-roots campaign. It's a response that would do the character Senator Jay Bulworth, so sick of selling his soul for donations that he arranged his own murder, proud.
''All that energy is available,'' Huffington said. ''Someone could theoretically start a Web site, a whole movement about bringing Warren Beatty to Washington.''
William Hillsman, who knows something of outsiders triumphing against long odds after helping Ventura become governor of Minnesota, said he would not rule out a Beatty victory just yet. While Hillsman would not say whether he is in discussions with the star, he did give him a decent chance at victory if he runs as a third-party candidate.
''What America doesn't understand about Beatty yet is how long and deep his involvement in politics goes,'' said Hillsman, president of North Woods Advertising in Minneapolis.
At best, however, some political analysts said Beatty could siphon enough liberal and celebrity-driven votes to make a small showing in the Democratic primary. In a three-way general election, they added, he might nick the party he has helped for more than decades.
''The Bulworth dream may have worked as a movie, but it wouldn't work as a reality,'' said Bruce Cain, a political science professor at the University of California at Berkeley. ''Let's say he played out his fantasy in terms of speaking frankly and speaking to the people. That's what Ross Perot did. ... But what would happen to Beatty after he raises money from unions or environmental groups. Does he continue to speak his mind or does he suddenly feel the same pressures as everyone else?''
But Bradley insisted his friend would not be interested in simply conversing with the country, then letting someone else sit in the Oval Office. He would not drag his wife, Annette Bening, and their three young children through the rough-and-tumble of a national campaign unless he meant to win.
And he would not put the Hollywood crowd, already committed to other candidates, in the position of snubbing an Academy Award winner unless he knew he had an audience.
''I think he's serious; he's not laughing,'' said Frank Mankiewicz, vice chairman of Hill & Knowlton public relations firm and another friend of Beatty's. ''He's willing to be president. I'm not so sure he's willing to go through a campaign.''
