Whether he’s playing a sociopathic stringer, a gay cowboy or a boy in a bubble, Jake Gyllenhaal has wowed us on the big screen for decades—but the Oscar nominee really surprised us when he made his off-Broadway debut in 2012, playing a supporting role in Nick Payne’s If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet. He must have had a blast, because he’s back on the New York theater scene, making his Broadway debut in another Payne drama: Constellations, opposite The Affair star Ruth Wilson. In the ethereal British import, Gyllenhaal plays Roland, a beekeeper who meets Marianne (Wilson) at a barbecue, unleashing a myriad of infinite possibilities. Gyllenhaal recently chatted with Broadway.com about his “beast” co-star, why he wants to put a beehive on the roof of the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre and more.

You’re back in New York in another Nick Payne play—is it safe to say you had fun last time?

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Former teen heartthrob Jake Gyllenhaal has, as of late, been favoring violent character studies over broad studio fare like “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” and “Love & Other Drugs.” Following intense, acclaimed performances in “End of Watch,” “Enemy” and last year’s hit thriller “Prisoners,” Gyllenhaal turned in what is arguably his best and darkest performance in this year’s “Nightcrawler.”

His performance as Lou, a sociopath who spends his nights filming footage of heinous crime scenes to sell to the morning news, has earned the actor the best reviews of his career and multiple awards nominations (and hopefully wins), cementing the 34-year-old as one of the most exciting actors working in Hollywood today.

“My character does do some morally corrupt things,” Gyllenhaal says of Lou in the video below. Here he explains Lou’s motivations, joined in the video by his co-stars in the film, Rene Russo and Riz Ahmed.

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Jake Gyllenhaal takes things seriously. Whether discussing his process or rumors of an offstage affair with Constellations costar Ruth Wilson, he chooses his words carefully and is endearingly earnest, especially for Hollywood’s perennial It boy. Perhaps because that’s not how the actor sees himself. Though Gyllenhaal, 34, is best known for high-profile film roles (an Oscar-nominated gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain; an amoral shutterbug in the recent Nightcrawler, which is generating big awards buzz), he says the stage is one of his “favorite places in the world to be.” His turn as a British beekeeper smitten with a physicist in Nick Payne’s time-bending romance, Constellations, at MTC marks his Broadway debut, but he insists he’s not slumming. He sees theater as an integral part of his future.

This is your second go with playwright Nick Payne and director Michael Longhurst, after If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet, two years ago at the Roundabout.

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Monday was a good day for the indie hit “Nightcrawler,” which kicked off the morning with nominations from both the Art Directors Guild and the Producers Guild of America. It was also a very busy day for its star and producer Jake Gyllenhaal, who spent his day off from appearing in previews of the Broadway play “Constellations” promoting the film. After appearing at a MoMA Q&A, he stopped by the NYFCC Awards dinner to present the best actress prize to Marion Cotillard. He then Skyped into a Q&A in Los Angeles with writer-director Dan Gilroy and editor John Gilroy, moderated by Variety’s Jenelle Riley. Gyllenhaal appeared larger-than-life on the movie screen behind the other participants, at one point jokingly “squishing” Gilroy’s head between his fingers.

The film stars Gyllenhaal as Lou Bloom, a wickedly intelligent outsider who begins shooting video at accident scenes to sell to the local news.

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Set in a theoretical reality of multiple universes, Broadway’s ‘Constellations’ requires actors to mind the punctuation as if it were the word of God.

In “Constellations,” two people, Roland and Marianne, play out their relationship again and again in what’s known as a multiverse—a hypothetical reality in which there are an infinite number of universes in which an infinite number of us exist, each living out a different version of our lives. To make such a theoretical premise clear on paper, playwright Nick Payne used three different fonts in the script—bold, italic, and normal—to denote that Roland and Marianne have switched to a new universe.

“A lot of people read [the script] and have lots of questions,” says Mr. Gyllenhaal, who took classes in Eastern religion at Columbia University, “and some people say, ‘Oh, I get it.’ I got it.”

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