No new filmmaker has a more fitting name than Eva Victor, writer-director-star of the seriocomic Sundance hit “Sorry, Baby.”
The actor and online comedian’s first feature attracted Lucas Hedges and Naomi Ackie as co-stars, “Moonlight” helmer Barry Jenkins as a producer and A24 as its distributor in an $8 million-range worldwide rights deal. When you add in Sundance’s Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, an 88/100 Metacritic score and a May 22 closing night slot in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight section, it all points to a promising June 27 limited/July 18 nationwide theatrical rollout.
“It’s wonderful,” says Victor, best known for a 2020-2023 role on the Showtime drama “Billions” and social media videos. “To go from no one knowing the movie exists to having it be something people are excited for, I feel really grateful for this little adventure.”
What’s even more remarkable is that Victor (who uses they/she pronouns) landed such a lucrative indie distribution deal for a film revolving around very serious subject matter. They star as a small-town New England college professor dealing with the aftermath of an unexpected assault, helped along by a concerned friend (Ackie), an offbeat boy next door (Hedges) and some surprisingly comic moments woven into this semi-autobiographical story.
“The character goes through the experience of feeling so out of control, and the devastation of that trauma is that your body feels like it doesn’t belong to you anymore. That’s such an intense, devastating, surreal experience,” Victor says. “I’ve been preparing the film for, in some ways, years. It was a really cathartic experience to act in it, [and] I got to have a ton of creative control. . . Then again, to do this work well, you also have to surrender to whatever magic is happening in the moment and try to capture it.”
Jenkins, who follows Victor on Instagram, played an invaluable role in getting it made. He reached out and said that if there was ever a script Victor wanted to send to his Pastel production company, they should. “Barry planted an important seed when he said, ‘Your videos are directing. You just don’t know that that’s what directing is. It’s just a completely different scale and medium.’”
Shooting the unannounced project under the radar “was a real blessing, because privacy when you make something vulnerable is so important,” Victor adds. “It gave me a chance to make the film exactly the way I wanted to, without any outside voices.”
The fast 24-day shoot was offset by a long post-production period last year. “It took some time to orient and distance myself, from being the actor looking at the actor to becoming the director looking at the actor. I was able to see myself onscreen [as] a different person.”
The Paris-born, San Francisco-raised filmmaker, repped by CAA and Management 360, is looking forward to some time off after thinking about this film “every day for the past four years,” and will choose what’s next on a project-by-project basis. “I feel like I had this real dream come true, and it spoiled me a bit. I think it will be, ‘Where can I be most useful?’ [or if I get a] ‘This is coming from my soul’ feeling. I’m really excited to see what the future holds.”
One clue to Victor’s future in drama and comedy may come from years spent at a U.S. French-language school. “We studied existentialism and that was meaningful, because I was brooding, like, ‘What’s the point of being alive knowing we’re going to die, you guys?’ I remember reading ‘The Stranger’ and thinking, ‘Yeah, everything sucks.’ And I just felt seen.”
