Stargazing

Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson's Broadway debut opened in previews Tuesday night at the Samuel Friedman Theatre. The costars spoke to Vogue about Constellations:

During a lunch break in a midtown rehearsal room I meet the pair of actors charged with finding those qualities, both of whom saw and fell in love with the play in London. Though Gyllenhaal has four films in the can, he has been increasingly drawn to the stage, most recently playing a drifter with boundary issues in If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet. Wilson, an off-kilter beauty, first made a splash as a young governess in the 2006 BBC miniseries of Jane Eyre and has since become a star in the U.S. as the mysterious Montauk waitress on Showtime’s The Affair—though she is a stage veteran with two Olivier awards. “I’d just done five months with a camera in my face and was quite keen to get back onstage and back into my body,” Wilson says. “But I wanted something that challenged me in a different way.”

“I think the thing that makes it challenging, and ultimately why I wanted to do it,” Gyllenhall adds, “is that it feels as if underneath the words is—forgive the pun—a universe of choices. And there will never be a night when those choices will be the same. Even in the past two days, we’ve interpreted certain scenes at least five ways.”



“That’s the genius of it,” says Wilson. “It’s a huge, universal theme, but told through a love story. It makes your mind spin with ideas and thoughts about all the options available to you, but also about how fate plays a role—maybe you don’t actually have any free will at all. Nick has a huge heart, along with an amazing intellect, and he combines the two in a really beautiful, simple way.”

“And the type of work we know we have to do,” Gyllenhaal adds quickly, “is a little terrifying for both of us—or maybe I should just speak for myself.”

“No, no,” Wilson says with a nervous laugh. “You can speak for me.”


The costars have been mitigating their terror through preparation: Gyllenhaal has been studying books on beekeeping, while Wilson has been watching documentaries about cosmology and spending time at a planetarium. Their job, of course, is to bring to life the vivid particulars of the relationship between their characters—one of whom sees life through the microcosm of the beehive while the other looks toward the vastness of space.

“It makes me think of all the permutations of relationships,” Gyllenhaal says. “Times when I’ve approached somebody and they haven’t been interested, or someone’s approached me and I haven’t been interested, or maybe things felt really, really right but it still didn’t work out—every incarnation possible. We’ve all had those moments.”



There won't be any reviews until the play officially opens. But on a rainy Tuesday night, many fans seemed happy to wait for the stars at the stage door:

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Jake and the Nightcrawler crew have also continued to receive gold stars from critics groups. Jake topped the Village Voice critics poll as Best Actor, as well as polls from the Austin and San Diego film critics. (I think I've missed some, but we'll post a tally later.)