As Black-ish and Grown-ish star Yara Shahidi pivots from acting to podcasting, the young star admitted to Today‘s Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager that she does not see herself working in politics – despite what Oprah Winfrey might believe.

Bush Hager asked the young starlet if she does see herself ending up on the hill one day, as many political figures have thrown their support behind her.

“There are so many women who admire you,” Bush Hager said during Monday’s (Nov. 18) broadcast on Today. “Mrs. Obama wrote your college recommendation. I think Oprah said that you would one day be president. Is that something you really want to do one day?”

Shahidi playfully turned down the honor of Winfrey’s endorsement, responding, “While I’m so grateful for the endorsement, I have to say politics-adjacent is where I always thought I’d end up landing, somewhere next to the hill.”

The 25-year-old actress has not shied away from politics in her career, however. She graduated in 2022 from Harvard University — where she was accepted in 2017 after Michelle Obama wrote her college recommendation letter — with a degree in “Black political thought under a neocolonial landscape,” per Vogue.

Winfrey made the claim on social media around 2018 when she said Shahidi is someone who gives her “hope for the future,” per Entertainment Tonight.

“I hope I’m still around when she becomes president of the United States. That is going to happen,” Winfrey said in a video. “If she wants it to happen.”

Shahidi has previously said it was a “peak life moment” for her.

“I definitely want to be in like, a politics-adjacent kind of position,” she told ET in 2018. “I do want to be in a place in which I can implement that level of change, president I don’t quite know.”

But she already had her trepidations about running for public office, even then. “I always think about how strange it’ll be that they’ll be going back through my Instagram that I had when I was 12,” she said at the time.

“So that’s a little eerie, but I definitely want to be [in Washington] D.C., yeah,” Shahidi added. 

Now, Shahidi is launching a new podcast with her mother about what motivates people, called The Optimist Project.