Nick Payne has dismissed rumours that his award-winning 2012 play Constellations is being adapted for the big screen.
In an interview with WhatsOnStage, Payne said he spoke “too soon” about the film version.
“It’s not happening,” he said. “At one point it was discussed, but then I realised I didn’t know how to do it on film.”
Constellations, which premiered at the Royal Court last year and transferred to the West End, made the 29-year-old playwright the youngest ever winner of the Evening Standard’s Best New Play award.
Inspired by multiverse theory, the play starred Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins (pictured) as a couple whose relationship evolves in several universes at once.
But Payne added he’s happy to keep it as a play.
“One of the amazing things that an adaptation of a play onto film can do is extend the life of the play,” he said. “But Constellations has kind of done that for itself in that it’s going on in Europe, it was on in Melbourne, it was on in South America.
“I just started to think ‘why am I doing it? Why does it need to be a film?’ And I came to the conclusion that it doesn’t.”
Payne’s new play The Same Deep Water As Me, set in the world of small claims insurance, premieres at the Donmar Warehouse tonight (6 August, previews from 1 August).
Read the full interview with Nick Payne and Daniel Mays here
