‘It's like a stone gets shoved into the river of your life': Eva Victor on sexual assault drama Sorry, Baby

The Guardian

3 hours ago

In late 2020, the actor and comedian Eva Victor decamped from New York to their cousin's house in rural Maine with a surprise window of time and an urgent subject. Covid had shut down production on Billions, Showtime's soapy finance drama on which Victor scored their first regular acting gig. Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, a fan of Victor's short comedy videos on social media, had DM-ed to offer encouragement and a request: send a script when you're ready.
That year, everything felt incomprehensibly big – global pandemic, political upheaval, social fracturing. But alone in wintry Maine, Victor turned far inwards, towards a quiet personal trauma. 'It's like a stone gets shoved into the river of your life. There's a lot of pain in trying to remove it and you can't,' says Victor. 'You just have to find a way for the water to move around it. It's so unfair that someone threw a stone into your life. It's hard to wrap your head around any of it.'
The stone was sexual assault, and the film – Victor's directorial debut, produced by Jenkins – is Sorry, Baby, a remarkably sharp portrait of healing that quietly upends the prevailing script on sexual violence in the long wake of #MeToo.
The film wowed audiences at Sundance and Cannes and garnered word-of-mouth buzz in the US when it was released in June, acclaimed for its welcome reimagining of what critic Parul Sehgal memorably termed the 'trauma plot': trauma as a flattening explanation and defining event. 'I think we often paint people as victims,' says Victor. 'In that way we make them tragic figures and try to look away from them. Or we make them just one thing, and people are complicated.'
Sorry, Baby presents trauma as an idiosyncratic, fickle, mutable thing, as opposed to the blunt, annihilating force that animates numerous films and TV shows loosely grouped under the #MeToo umbrella, from the black heart of Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman to the deadening shock of Zoë Kravitz's Blink Twice.
Victor plays Agnes, a twentysomething English academic in a small New England town who, about 25 minutes into the film, experiences something awful. She goes to the home of her thesis supervisor, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi), after he changes the location of their meeting at the last minute. The camera lingers outside the house, the darkening sky saying all you need to know. 'I wanted the film to talk about what happens after this kind of violence,' says Victor. 'I didn't want to show it.'
Afterwards Agnes drives home in mute horror, and tells her best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), what happened in jumbled, detached details. Neither say the word rape, but they both know; Lydie confirms: 'Yeah, that's the thing.' The rest of the film, which proceeds in one chapter per year, builds on principles that feel true to life: that processing is non-linear and inconsistent; that the self is multifaceted and mutable; that life goes on in a whole variety of tones; that trauma can shape a person but not define them. 'Ultimately we're all just afraid,' says Victor. 'We don't want it to be possible that it could happen to someone like us. So we make it seem as if they are particular people who it's meant to happen to.'
In conversation, Victor is much like their film: warm, chatty, at turns wise and childlike, their long sleeves covering their hands. We discuss the demise of a particularly excellent sandwich shop in Brooklyn, where Victor lived until relocating to Los Angeles last year. They now live in the same city as their best friend – fittingly, as the most important fact about Agnes, at least to the viewer, is her close friendship with Lydie. We first meet the pair four years after the assault, during a heady reunion marked by the half-finished thoughts and tangled limbs of intimate, platonic love. The trauma is tacitly acknowledged, shown clearly in the gulf between how Lydie's life galloped – city, marriage, baby – while Agnes's crawled. 'I really wanted to give them a fighting chance at being whole people,' says Victor of the first chapter. 'If Agnes and Lydie can be these full people who we love, it's harder to look away from them later on when a bad thing happens. It's harder to paint Agnes as something, or to categorise her.'
The friendship also provides the canvas for comedy, and Sorry, Baby is – crucially – funny, its characters often speaking in stilted, off-the-cuff blurts. Victor walks a tonal tightrope between deadpan and earnest, the result of years spent working on a comedy career. Raised in San Francisco, they studied acting and playwriting at Northwestern University in Illinois and were active in the school's improv scene. A few days after graduating in 2016, they moved to New York with aspirations to work on a late-night chatshow. They landed, instead, at the feminist satirical website Reductress, cranking out four to five posts a day ('insane') and poking fun at the girlbossing cliches of the time. ('Get it, bitch! This woman got in the shower.')
For a few years, they lived the aspiring comic's life in New York: standup sets, acting gigs and part-time jobs, including one fitting customers at a bridal shop. ('I was very bad at it,' says Victor, but 'it taught me a lot about gender, and how euphoric it can be for some women to feel like women and how dysphoric it can feel for others.') There were many unsuccessful auditions, scripts that 'just weren't landing. I was wanting to make things, but I felt as if no one was letting me. And I was like, 'That's not fair, I'm just going to do it.''
Victor started posting short videos to what was then Twitter, in which they played arch, spiralling characters – a woman explaining to her boyfriend why they're going to straight pride, a woman who definitely didn't kill her husband. Many went viral. Jenkins messaged, and Victor took another crack at screenwriting, although not, they say, intending to speak to anything bigger than themselves, nor against a certain trauma trope. They drew from the interiority in Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women, the understatement in Andrew Haigh's 45 Years, the beauty of Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love. And they watched Michaela Coel's 'completely transcendent' BBC-HBO series I May Destroy You – perhaps the closest antecedent to Sorry, Baby in terms of treating trauma as a thread, rather than the whole cloth. 'You see someone doing something so truthfully, and you wonder: 'What's my version of that?'' says Victor.
After reading a first draft of the script in 2021, Jenkins encouraged Victor to direct. Having worked with first-time film-makers on two searing debuts – Charlotte Wells's Aftersun and Raven Jackson's All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt – Jenkins and his producing partners Adele Romanski and Mark Ceryak put Victor in an ad-hoc directing bootcamp, practising certain shots and shadowing Jane Schoenbrun on the set of their acclaimed film I Saw the TV Glow, before filming for Sorry, Baby commenced in Massachusetts in 2024.
Although years in the making, Sorry, Baby's smallness, its bracing but uncynical honesty, feels of the moment. The collective momentum of the #MeToo movement has dissipated; backlash (and, often, hellish litigation) has engulfed many women who spoke up; catharsis did not lead to material change. Agnes and Lydie are pessimistic about the chances of accountability, and understandably wary of the criminal justice system. All Agnes has – all anyone has – is herself, her life, her friends. Victor still bristles at any larger movement critique; many times during this press tour, they've been asked some version of: What does this say about the #MeToo movement? 'And I'm like, 'Well, by the way, what are we even talking about?'' they laugh. 'All I know is this one version of this story, all I want to talk about is this attempt at healing.'
Victor is also reticent on the inspiration for that experience; making movies may be the opposite speed of social media posts, but virality taught Victor 'how little I want people to know about my personal life'. They have maintained a privacy line throughout interviews for the film. 'I say it's a very personal story, which is true. And I say it is narrative fiction, in which I find a lot of comfort and joy, because I got to make Agnes and build a world around her that supports the exact story I want to tell.'
And that story is not just trauma – it's professional success, grief about friends entering a different life-stage, ambivalence about getting older, and the loneliness of being on your own timeline. Agnes, in these chapters, is 'very much in process,' says Victor. 'As we all are.'
Sorry, Baby is in UK cinemas from 22 August
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html