Tucked away in the corner of the Chateau Marmont garden on a sunny Friday afternoon, Eva Victor, cloaked in black, is telling me about stumbling, unwittingly, into comedy. The story begins at Northwestern’s prestigious theater program, where Victor harbored ambitions to perform Chekhov and Euripides. “No one would cast me in those plays,” the 31-year-old writer-director-actor says. “I kept trying to do serious monologues and everyone would laugh.” The recent Los Angeles transplant takes a sip of Earl Grey tea with oat milk. “It was so upsetting,” they recall, in a droll deadpan that neatly elucidates the problem: Victor can’t help but be funny.
It’s this “problem” that makes Victor’s directorial debut, Sorry, Baby, thrilling to behold, a high-wire film that glides from hilarity to heartbreak and back again. The story centers on Agnes, a graduate student turned English professor played by Victor, who must piece her life back together after a traumatic event that is never shown and is referred to almost exclusively as “The Bad Thing.” Victor, previously known for viral comedy videos and a supporting role on the Showtime series Billions, can now add auteur to their résumé with Sorry, Baby, which was produced by Academy Award–winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins, debuted at Sundance, and was acquired by art house giant A24 for a ballpark $8 million. It will open in theaters in June and also stars Naomi Ackie and Lucas Hedges.
Defying easy categorization is a recurring theme for Victor, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/she pronouns interchangeably. When I ask if she would prefer to use both of her pronouns in this profile, Victor’s olive-green eyes widen. “Are you allowed ?” she asks. “Nonbinary for me has always been the space in-between. And that’s the thing that people are really uncomfortable with. The idea of, ‘I can’t totally figure you out.’ But it’s a huge gift to give to yourself to think you could be more than one thing, that you could be limitless.”
Her assessment of what genre Sorry, Baby fits into is similarly expansive. “Everyone wants a box, don’t they?” she says with a laugh. “I understand why genre exists and I love things that are genre, but I think the film travels on a spectrum of drama and comedy.” Just don’t call the film a traumedy. “Send them to my office,” Victor says of any reviewer who would apply that portmanteau to the film. “I’ll have some words.”
Hedges, who plays Agnes’s gentle but aimless neighbor, Gavin, recognized the uniqueness of the film when it only existed on the page. “It reminded me of things I loved, while also feeling like its own thing,” he says. “I didn’t feel like the film was directly following in anyone’s footsteps”—mentioning only Kenneth Lonergan, who directed Hedges in Manchester by the Sea, in the same breath—“which is the nature of Eva’s charm.”
At the core of Sorry, Baby, and from which much of its levity springs, is the friendship between Agnes and her best friend, Lydie, played by Ackie (Blink Twice, Mickey 17). Lydie is Agnes’s ride-or-die, a Black lesbian Ted Hughes scholar who acts as a tether to the outside world, keeping Agnes from slipping into a void. “She comes in and revitalizes Agnes with energy,” Ackie says, comparing Lydie to CPR.
“The friendship exists in the laughter,” is how Victor describes it, and Ackie couldn’t agree more. “One of my favorite scenes is when we’re on the couch and we’re talking about how guys have sex,” says the London-based actress. “We tried so many different takes and we made ourselves laugh until we cried.”
Lydie is based on a close friend of Victor’s, someone they’ve known since they were a teenager in San Francisco. “We went to theater camp and then college together,” Victor says. “She’s the person I call every day and who I basically say anything I have to figure out to.” Victor likens that kind of friendship to a “slow-moving train that’s underneath everything.”