For Eva Victor, the road to making Sorry, Baby began in a kind of pandemic-era “hell.”
It was 2020, and Victor was living in a small Brooklyn apartment with approximately one window and a troublemaking teenage cat. The 31-year-old filmmaker, who uses they/she pronouns, got a list of movie recommendations from a friend and began watching them in bed on their computer. In a period of lockdown isolation and depression, Victor says, it finally felt “like someone else was in the room with me, when a film was in the room with me.”
“To me, it felt lifesaving,” Victor says.
Films such as Burning, Secrets & Lies, Tampopo, Pariah, and In the Mood for Love became inspirations as Victor started writing a screenplay based on a time of crisis and healing in their own life.
That script became Victor’s feature directorial debut, Sorry, Baby, which premiered at Sundance in January, won the festival’s Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, and sold to A24 for a reported $8 million. The rest of 2025 has been no less busy for Victor, who was recently revealed as the star of the new Loewe perfumes campaign. And after a run in theaters, Sorry, Baby began streaming on HBO Max on Thursday.
The film follows Agnes, a literature professor at a New England college, as she navigates life before and after a sexual assault. The “bad thing,” as the film calls it, isn’t shown. Instead, the audience bears witness through Agnes’s words as she tells her best friend, Lydie, what happened.
Victor’s decision to keep the viewer outside the violence, and to have the film wholeheartedly take Agnes at her word, is what sets Sorry, Baby apart.
Victor wanted to make a movie that “felt like it didn’t shock my audience,” she says. “Instead, I hoped it felt like it held their hands through the experience of watching it, and that [it] was hugging you more than it was scaring you.”
The result is a tender portrait of friendship and the feeling of being stuck, when your life seems to stop while the rest of the world keeps going. As funny and disarming as it is gut-wrenching, the film blends humor, drama, and emotion in a way that feels unique to Victor.
Born in Paris and raised in San Francisco, Victor gravitated toward performance at a young age. She sang at Obama’s inauguration in 2009, as a member of a professional children’s chorus. At her French-speaking high school, the International School of San Francisco, she played Wendla Bergmann in a production of Spring Awakening. “It meant everything to me. I got to act, I got to yell, I got to scream, I got to sing,” Victor says.
At Northwestern University, she found that she wasn’t accepted as a singer (“because I couldn’t sing”), so she pivoted to comedy, joining improv and sketch groups, where she felt more at home. “That transition kind of just happened with rejection,” she says with a laugh, “as the best ones do.”
Victor moved to New York after graduating, in 2016, and went on to write for Reductress and The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs column. She posted comedy videos online—like “me when I def did not murder my husband,” in which she plays a wealthy (and guilty) woman, dodging detectives’ questions while sipping a beachside cocktail—which led to a three-season role in the television series Billions, and caught the eye of Pastel, Barry Jenkins’s production company.
“The videos you’re making are little films,” Victor recalls Jenkins telling her.
When Victor sent Pastel the script for Sorry, Baby, Jenkins and his partners understood the vision and encouraged her to direct it. To prepare, Victor undertook a filmmaking intensive that included meticulous storyboarding, mock shoots, and shadowing the writer-director Jane Schoenbrun on the set of the horror film I Saw the TV Glow.
Early on, Victor knew she wanted to cast Lucas Hedges as Gavin, Agnes’s neighbor. “I feel like I watched him grow up on-screen,” she says. She wrote him a letter asking him to sign on to the project, and he accepted. “It was lovely to meet him as an adult in a way that felt really new,” she says. “And he’s a comedian, by the way.” As for the role of Lydie, Victor brought on Naomi Ackie after a reading in which, Victor says, there was immediate warmth and chemistry. It was “like casting a romantic lead,” she adds.
The choice to cast Ackie paid off. In the film, Agnes and Lydie have an easy rapport, a telepathy that feels real. You’re invited into the glow, the intimacy of their friendship and its power. It’s a feeling and an experience that is close to Victor’s heart.
“I think best friendship feels like the love story of my life—one of them,” Victor says.
Sorry, Baby is available for streaming on HBO Max
Anna Grace Lee is a New York–based writer who covers culture, lifestyle, and entertainment. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire, and other publications
