Eva Victor after Sorry, Baby: a debut filmmaker now acting for Gilroy and Schoenbrun

Eva Victor

Photo: Dan Depew / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 11, 1994 Paris, France
Occupation	Filmmaker, screenwriter and actor
Known for	Sorry, Baby, Shithouse, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Awards	Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, Sundance Film Festival · Independent Spirit · National Board of Review · Valladolid International Film Festival, Best Actress

For a while, a lot of people knew Eva Victor as a face on a phone screen: a deadpan young comedian explaining, in less than a minute, why they and their boyfriend were going to straight pride. The same person wrote, directed and starred in Sorry, Baby, a film about the long, strange aftermath of a sexual assault that never puts the assault on screen, won the screenwriting prize at Sundance and set off a bidding war among distributors.

The joke and the wound turned out to be one instrument. Victor has said as much in plain words: “I don’t really know how to write a straight drama.” What they do next with that instrument is the question their career is asking right now, and for the moment the answers are arriving from other people’s sets, in films by Jane Schoenbrun and Tony Gilroy.

Paris is where Victor was born, on February 11, 1994, but San Francisco is where they grew up, after the family moved to California. They went to the French-speaking International School of San Francisco and sang in a choir, then studied acting at Northwestern University with a minor in playwriting, performing with the improv team on the side. A dramatic showcase after graduation got them an agent. The comedy came from somewhere else.

That somewhere was Reductress, the feminist satire site, where Victor started as an intern and became an associate editor and staff writer. They wrote humor pieces for The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts column, acted with the children’s theater company Story Pirates in New York, made videos for Comedy Central and, above all, posted short sketches to Twitter that travelled much further than their author. One of the people watching was the Oscar-winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins, who became a fan of the videos long before he became a producer of Victor’s first feature.

Television gave them steady work before it gave them a profile. On Showtime’s Billions, Victor played Rian, a recurring character across the drama’s final seasons between 2020 and 2023. In Super Pumped, the 2022 anthology about the rise of Uber, they played Susan Fowler, the engineer whose public account of harassment inside the company set off a corporate reckoning. Seen from here, it was an early sign of the material Victor would choose to write about, from the side of the person who is expected to stay quiet.

Filmmaking became a serious ambition during the pandemic. Victor shadowed Schoenbrun on the set of I Saw the TV Glow and has cited films by Ingmar Bergman, Wong Kar-wai and Víctor Erice among their influences, a demanding private canon for someone known for one-minute sketches. The script itself was written in a cousin’s house in rural Maine, where Victor spent three winter weeks alone with their cat.

Sorry, Baby follows Agnes, a literature graduate student at a small New England college, played by Victor, through the years after her thesis adviser assaults her. The film is told in chapters, out of order, and its most important scene happens off camera: we see Agnes leave the house, not what happened inside it. Naomi Ackie plays Lydie, the best friend who carries much of the film’s warmth, with Lucas Hedges as the neighbor who becomes her lover and John Carroll Lynch as a sandwich shop owner who talks Agnes down from a panic attack in his parking lot. It was shot in Ipswich, Massachusetts, on a budget of roughly $1.5 million, and produced by Jenkins with Adele Romanski and Mark Ceryak. Victor, who is a survivor of sexual assault, has said the goal was to make an audience “feel safe enough to laugh.”

The critical response was close to unanimous. A24 won the bidding with a reported $8 million for worldwide rights, and after Sundance came the closing slot of the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, then a 97 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes from 200 reviews, the National Board of Review prize for best directorial debut, and the Independent Spirit Award for best screenplay in February 2026. Victor was nominated for a Golden Globe as best actress in a drama, and Julia Roberts used part of her time on the Globes stage to tell viewers to go and see the film.

Then the Academy announced its nominations, and Sorry, Baby was not on the list, not even in original screenplay, the category where pundits had expected it. The film grossed about $3.3 million worldwide. The restraint that critics praised is also what kept it small: a comedy about rape that refuses both the courtroom and the revenge plot is easy to admire and hard to sell. Not every review was won over, either. A minority of critics found the comic interludes self-conscious and the tone, at moments, too tidy for its subject, an objection that the film’s own structure, built on deflection, invites rather than answers.

The year after the debut has been an actor’s year. In Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Schoenbrun’s horror film starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, Victor plays DJ Ella Giastic; the film opened the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in May 2026, won the Queer Palm there and reached American theaters through MUBI in August. It closes a small circle, with Victor now cast by the filmmaker they once watched from behind the monitor.

The bigger stage is Behemoth!, Tony Gilroy’s film about a cellist and former child prodigy, played by Pedro Pascal, who returns to Los Angeles to score movies. Victor plays Nadia, his colleague and new love interest, opposite Olivia Wilde as his former girlfriend. The film premiered on October 2, 2026, as the Centerpiece of the 64th New York Film Festival, to reviews that were mostly positive with some mixed and negative notices, and most of the attention went to Pascal.

Victor identifies as queer and non-binary, and uses both they/them and she/her pronouns. They have talked openly about the experience behind Sorry, Baby and very little about anything else in their private life.

Searchlight Pictures releases Behemoth! in American theaters on December 4, 2026, which will put Victor in front of the widest audience of their career, as an actor in someone else’s film. No second feature as writer and director has been announced. The bet on Victor was always that the first film was a voice, not a one-off, and the only thing that can settle it is the script they have not yet shown anyone.

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