‘Sorry, Baby’ Star Eva Victor on Her Comedy Career and Debut Film News

E
va Victor is carrying a ludicrously capacious bag. When I can’t help but reference the now memed-to-death Succession bit, Victor juts out their jaw and says, in a pitch-perfect Tom Wambsgans impression, “Shiv.” 

I’m relieved, if not surprised, that Victor got the reference. The actor-writer-director, who is 31 and uses they/she pronouns, has spent the last decade or so as a niche internet presence, going viral periodically on Twitter (and then X) and TikTok with satirical front-facing videos and bone-dry one-liners. (Example: “someday i hope a man takes off my clothes with the same care he takes off the tinfoil of his carnitas burrito.”) But now, they’re introducing themselves to a whole new audience — in a whole new way — with Sorry, Baby, an intimate, poignant drama that wowed audiences at both the Sundance and Cannes film festivals, and will be released in theaters by A24 on June 27. The film, which Victor wrote, stars in, and marks their directorial debut, heralds the arrival of a singular voice.

Victor suggested we meet today at Color Me Mine, the pottery-painting studio, in Pasadena. They’ve recently started painting “as, like, my new lifestyle.” Victor pulls out their phone to show me a couple of canvases they recently completed at home in L.A.: One is a mouse and the other “is like an eyeball thing.”

As we consider potential color palettes for our respective mugs, I notice that Victor is wearing four shades of green, from the chartreuse stripes on their track pants to a forest-tone knitted scarf, a khaki sweater-vest, and an olive-colored crystal pendant tied to a string around their neck. That last item is called a wishing necklace — a Christmas gift from Victor’s cousin. “You make a wish, and when [the crystal] falls off, it means the wish is coming true,” Victor explains. “So either I have a necklace, or my dreams are coming true. What a perfect situation.”

VICTOR SHOULD GET READY for that necklace to break. The early accolades for Sorry, Baby — which won both a standing ovation and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance — are well deserved. Quietly stirring and wryly funny, the film stars Victor as Agnes, a grad student turned English lit professor, and captures the events leading up to and following her sexual assault at the hands of her thesis adviser. As she fights to retain a sense of normalcy and process the experience, Agnes runs up against institutional failures at the doctor’s office and the university admin office, panic attacks and bodily dissociation, and the creeping suspicion that everyone else — including her best friend Lydie (a sparkling Naomi Ackie) — is moving on with their lives while she remains frozen in place. The film reinforces Agnes’ emotional suspension through literary references. In one foreshadowing scene, Agnes’ professor gives her a first-edition copy of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, a 1927 novel set in a family vacation house where, as one character puts it, “time stands still” and inspiration is clouded over by memories.

While Sorry, Baby is centered around trauma and the nonlinear healing process, it isn’t one-note. Victor deftly toes the line between soul-shaking hurt and sly observational humor, which are much more closely related than a lot of scripts know how to communicate. The film is also based on Victor’s lived experience, though they are reluctant to expound upon how literal they got while writing it, or exactly which events inspired the story. 

“I think part of the point of making a film is that you say everything you want to say in the film,” Victor says. “People ask me questions, and it’s like, I promise whatever you want to know, the answer I want to give you is in the film.”

The fact that Victor has an intensely private streak might read as ironic, given how they first came to prominence: a series of comedy videos that were all over Twitter and TikTok as Covid lockdown took hold in 2020. Until that point, Victor had been living a typical postgrad creative life in Brooklyn, matriculating through the stand-up comedy scene and working part-time at the woman-run satire website Reductress. (You can thank Victor for then-viral, now-classic headlines like “I Never Thought I Would Find Love. And Then I Didn’t.”) In addition to doing a little stand-up, Victor hosted Reductress’ monthly show, Haha Wow!, at the UCB Theatre in Hell’s Kitchen. But after the pandemic temporarily shut down New York’s live comedy scene, Victor realized they could still make audiences laugh, if just a little more on their terms. 

“Performing would cause me a lot of anxiety,” Victor says. “I really didn’t want to talk about my private life onstage. The best stand-up people are willing to be completely transparent in certain ways. And then when the pandemic happened, it was like, what I’m experiencing is actually relief. 

“I’ve always been someone who likes to go to bed early and doesn’t feel so social all the time,” they add. “When I imagined the future, I was like, ‘This isn’t sustainable for me.’ In order to be good at stand-up, you have to do it all the time. You have to care about it more than anything in the world. And it became clear that that wasn’t true for me.”

Though Victor had gone viral before — thanks to their “me explaining to my boyfriend why we’re going to straight pride” video in 2019 — the creative exploration that lockdown offered proved fruitful. The next couple of years raised their profile even more, with videos about coming out to your friends, who instantly make it about themselves; how to social distance, from a pre-lockdown expert; and a one-woman parody about “the girl from the movie who doesn’t believe in love.” By then, Victor had left Reductress and was paying the bills with a job at a bridal shop, where they would secretly film videos wearing the wedding dresses. 

“When I was writing this film, it was a joyful experience to have it exist in my life so privately.”

“They found out about my videos and said it was the most disappointing thing anyone had ever done who worked there,” Victor says. “All my childhood stuff of, like, ‘you failed’ came up. I felt so ashamed and so embarrassed. I almost wrote them a letter. And then I was like, that’s insane… I think they are still hugely upset with me, and I legit am afraid of them.”

As we paint our mugs — Victor is working on a butter-yellow, sky-blue, and mauve swirl — a little girl peeks over her shoulder to stare at Victor, who says, “Hi!” When the girl wordlessly turns away, Victor deadpans, “She hates me.” 

BORN IN PARIS IN 1994, Victor and their parents (who are American) later moved to the Bay Area, where Victor grew up attending an “intensely disciplined” French-speaking school in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley. “There was no, like, cafeteria or anything,” they say. “It was just, bring your lunch or go out for lunch. I don’t know, I think I had this fantasy of a suburban life where, like, I drove a car and had Uggs and boyfriends and stuff.” 

Before attending college at Northwestern University, Victor was primarily involved in a choral group (“We rehearsed, like, three days a week. We low-key performed at Obama’s inauguration. It was cold as fuck”) and college-level theater courses. “I was in the musical my senior year, which was Spring Awakening. It’s genuinely the most proud I’ve ever been. When we did that, I was like, ‘OK, I think this is what I want to do with my life.’”

Victor discovered comedy at Northwestern, where they studied acting and playwriting, and after graduation moved with a bunch of friends to New York to hit the stand-up circuit. After gaining a sizeable social media following, Victor started making videos for Comedy Central’s YouTube channel, many of which zeroed in on anxiety-inducing situations like trying to figure out who will pay at the end of a date, making elevator small-talk, and mustering up the courage to pop open a can of seltzer mid-meeting. From 2020 to 2023, Victor also appeared on Showtime’s Billions, where they played Rian, a young hedge-fund trader. 

All the while, in the background, Victor was hard at work on a deeply personal project, one that would eventually turn into Sorry, Baby. They had grown weary of making front-facing comedy videos and soon felt as if they’d said everything they needed to say within the format. So when Billions filming shut down during Covid, Victor took the opportunity to spend a couple of months subletting their cousin’s house in Maine, where they worked on their screenplay. 

“It was really intense,” Victor says. “It was super wintery. I got my car stuck in banks of snow. But it was really cool. I felt really purposeful. I was really using it as a time to write and be introspective and just spend time with myself.” 

When the screenplay was ready for another set of eyes, Victor sent it to the director Barry Jenkins, who’d followed them on Instagram with an encouraging note that Victor should feel free to send him a piece of work when they were ready. Victor also had a champion in director Jane Schoenbrun, who let Victor shadow them on set while filming last year’s I Saw the TV Glow. “It was amazing,” Victor says of studying Schoenbrun (who also uses they pronouns) at work. “They’re so confident and so funny. They taught me antidote lessons to what my issues are. I came in feeling someone needed to give me permission to [direct]. And then I saw them being like, ‘I’m supposed to do this.’ It was a real eye-opening experience of, ‘Oh, directing a movie can look a lot of ways.’”

The feeling was mutual. “Eva shadowing me on TV Glow was one of the most generous gifts I’ll ever receive,” Schoenbrun tells Rolling Stone over email, describing their time together as “a really fun and special experience that bonded me to Eva for life.” Schoenbrun also heaps praise on Sorry, Baby and Victor’s startlingly honest performance. “I believe they’re a true star in the sense that there’s no one else on earth with anything close to their style — that strange mix of psycho charisma and deadpan awkwardness,” Schoenbrun says. “Watching the film as a friend, it’s easy for me to take for granted how brilliant their performance is. But when I step back and see the magnitude of their accomplishment in front of and behind the camera, I’m just truly left in awe of their bravery and wit and artistry.” 

No doubt after Sorry, Baby screens beyond the film festival circuit, audiences will place Victor in the star category as well. Is Victor, a self-proclaimed introvert, prepared for that level of attention? “When I was writing this film, it was a joyful experience to have it exist in my life so privately, until Sundance,” they say. “And I think it’s a bit of a gift to give myself that privacy again for whatever happens next. I’m excited to go back into my private zone.”

Victor’s tendency to hide themselves away mirrors another little mouse they’ve painted — this one is peeking up from the bottom of their mug, which is finished and ready for the kiln. As they get ready to leave the pottery studio — next week will be a rush of movie press — Victor is bracing for an avalanche of invasive questions about their life and the experience that inspired Sorry, Baby. But as soon as they can justify it, Victor will disappear into a hole in the wall, only to come out again when they feel inspired.