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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Jake stopped by the Today Show this morning to talk about his latest film, ‘Nightcrawler’, and ‘Constellations’. Follow the link below to watch the interview in our video archive or download it in our media section.

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In 2009, the playwright Nick Payne, then just 25, won the admiration of English critics and audiences, along with the prestigious George Devine Award, for his remarkably self-assured debut, If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet. A year or so later, he made a series of choices that led to the play that confirmed him as one of the most dazzlingly gifted dramatists of a new generation—sharp, funny, wise, humane.

First, he chose to watch a documentary about the declining honeybee population and decided to write a play about an artisanal beekeeper, only to abandon it because, he says, “I wasn’t quite sure how you do bees live onstage.” Not long after this he happened to watch The Elegant Universe, hosted by the physicist Brian Greene, who explained the multiverse theory, which says that there exist a vast number of parallel universes in which we’re living out different versions of our lives based on our having made different choices, large and small, along the way.

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