Meet the Auteur Behind This Summer’s Most Emotional Film ~ VOUX MAG

Meet the Auteur Behind This Summer's Most Emotional Film Story By Ariana Marsh, Photograph by PhilipDaniel Ducasse; Styling by Gabriella KarefaJohnsonAugust 19, 2025 at 6:04 AM There's a Reason Eva Victor Has a Window Tattoo PHILIPDANIEL DUCASSE "Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or rev...

- - Meet the Auteur Behind This Summer's Most Emotional Film

Story By Ariana Marsh, Photograph by Philip-Daniel Ducasse; Styling by Gabriella Karefa-JohnsonAugust 19, 2025 at 6:04 AM

There's a Reason Eva Victor Has a Window Tattoo PHILIP-DANIEL DUCASSE

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Jacket and trousers, Loewe. B.zero1 earrings and ring and Serpenti Viper ring, Bulgari. PHILIP-DANIEL DUCASSE

I 'm waiting inside a sun-drenched café in downtown Manhattan when I spot Eva Victor through the window. We're in Dimes Square—a microneighborhood whose coolness has become both an aesthetic and a punchline—and Victor, clad in an oversize black vintage T-shirt emblazoned with a flaming skull, fits the scene like a reference. Basketball shorts hang below their knees, Converse are on their feet, and their face—with cheekbones that could cut glass—is bare, save for a fleck of silver glitter over their right eye that shimmers like a flea-size disco ball in the morning light.

We collect our coffees and begin our conversation by talking about tattoos. On Victor's middle finger is a small, crude window—just a rectangle divided into four panes. They tell me they got it in France in their mid-20s from an Italian woman who spoke neither French nor English. "I drew this really intricate window with an awning, and she was like, 'I can't do that,' " Victor, now 31, tells me. The woman showed them what she could do. Victor immediately agreed. "It's a real janky tattoo, but, low-key, I'm obsessed that she decided this was okay."

Eva Victor in Sorry Baby, 2025 A24

The window tattoo is, perhaps, an obvious metaphor for their debut feature, Sorry, Baby, which they wrote, directed, and star in—but it's also apt. As we talk, it becomes clear that light—how to find it, let it in, and reflect it back—is the throughline of their creative pursuit. The film, a quiet but piercing study of trauma's long tail, premiered earlier this year at Sundance, where Victor won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. It is a sensitive and unsparing portrait of a woman named Agnes who is grappling with the complicated aftermath of sexual assault. Critically, it doesn't center the assault itself but rather the healing process that follows. The story is an intensely personal one for Victor and one that they needed to tell as much as they needed to see. "When this kind of trauma is depicted onscreen, it's often depicted very accurately, and that was too difficult for me to bear as a watcher for a long time," they share. "I was trying to write the film I needed at a time in my life that I couldn't find."

Peppered with comedic moments yet intensely tender and raw, Sorry, Baby could only come from someone with Victor's particular trajectory. Raised in San Francisco and trained in both acting and comedy, they attended Northwestern, where they studied playwriting. After graduating, they juggled multiple jobs to stay afloat while auditioning and performing standup in New York: working the front desks of gyms, nannying, and selling wedding gowns in a bridal shop—a job they were quick to admit was not the best fit.

"I love Eva very, very, very much. But Eva is honestly pretty weird in a room," says their close friend Celeste Yim, a Saturday Night Live writer. "They are super tall. They usually have a huge sweater on with a big hood that they are so deeply inside of that it's hard to even understand that there's a person in there. They are kinda awkward and a little skittish, and they usually have a bag of gummies or chips as, like, a safety blanket. But then you talk to them, they make you laugh, and you realize that they also have the charm of George Clooney? It's very confusing."

Victor first gained prominence in 2019 on Twitter, where their sharply observed comedic videos dissecting social norms and political absurdities found a devoted following. Standouts include Me Explaining to My Boyfriend Why Equal Pay Makes Actually No Sense at All, in which they mock the arguments sometimes made against equal pay, and Your Straight Friend When You Come Out, which satirizes how people can overreact or act awkwardly when someone comes out to them. "They pick up on mannerisms so well," says Yim. "Whenever they do a comedy character, it always feels like an impression of someone real—but it's actually just coming from some amalgam of characteristics they've noticed and stored away in their mind."

your straight friend when you come out pic.twitter.com/IlY0slMnId

— Eva Victor (@evavictor) April 14, 2021

These videos caught the attention of the director Barry Jenkins, who followed Victor on Twitter. "I remember watching them and thinking, 'This person is magnetic, super creative, absolutely hilarious,' " he says. By then, Victor had been cast in a recurring role on Billions, which allowed them to hone their dramatic acting skills. Jenkins reached out, saying, "Hey, if you ever want help trying to figure out how to make a feature film, our company, Pastel, would love to be involved."

It was observing their friend, the director Jane Schoenbrun, on the set of I Saw the TV Glow that made Victor believe they could do it. "They were instrumental," they say of Schoenbrun, whom they shadowed—along with Schoenbrun's assistant, Sepi Mashiahof—for months, learning the ins and outs of filmmaking. "We kind of created this little triad of queer joy on that set that was really, really meaningful to me, and they both instilled so much confidence in me that I could do it."

Victor wrote Sorry, Baby in a cabin in Maine during the pandemic, a period marked by obsessive study. They reverse-shotlisted two entire films—Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women and Jenkins's Moonlight—stealing insights on framing and pacing. They also storyboarded every scene in Sorry, Baby and did test shoots of two scenes, with support from Pastel. "It was really cool to watch Eva go from in front of the camera to behind the camera at the turn of a dime," Jenkins recalls. "I don't act in my own work, so I've never had that experience. They really trusted the other people on the film set to help them see what it was they were creating."

Yim, who watched Sorry, Baby alongside a group of mutual friends, remembers the experience as more than just a screening. "When you have friends that are artists, there's often a box that your friends' things go into. But when I watched Eva's movie, it didn't feel like that. Their embodiment of Agnes felt like watching someone completely new and foreign to me. I was like, 'How is it that I don't recognize them at all?'"

The film is modest in scale but capacious in feeling. It spans four and a half years in the life of Agnes (Victor), a graduate student reeling from a predatory relationship with a professor. After his abrupt departure, Agnes inherits not only his teaching position but also his office, which makes for a discomfiting symmetry that further complicates her healing. Much of the film unfolds in a small house Agnes initially shares with her best friend, Lydie, played with bright precision by Naomi Ackie. The house—cluttered, lived-in, shadowed with memory—becomes a kind of emotional barometer. When Lydie is there, it's warm, even golden. When she's gone, it feels haunted.

"It's about what happens to a friendship when one person's life is moving forward and the other is stuck," Victor says. Over the course of the film, Lydie moves to New York, meets and marries her wife, and becomes pregnant. But her presence—literal or otherwise—remains a steadying force for Agnes. Their friendship is intimate, elastic, and sustaining; it is the heart of the film. When I ask Victor about their favorite moment from the set, they recall an early scene with Ackie where they're sitting on a couch, "making fun of guys, basically."

Eva Victor in Sorry Baby, 2025 A24

"We shot it like five times. Every single time, we would have laughing attacks. Naomi tried to drink a sip of tea during the laughing attack and choked. We were trying to flag a medic but were laughing too hard," they say. Still, it remains one of their fondest memories from the set. "Naomi is funny beyond money," Victor says. "She's completely full of sun."

Though Sorry, Baby circles trauma, it resists neat conclusions. It is also occasionally very funny, its realism rooted in relatable messiness. "I wanted the film to hold the watcher's hand through it," says Victor of the script's lighter fare. "One of the devices that I found effective for doing that is giving the audience moments of relief, which is hopefully where the humor exists in the film."

In the final scene, Agnes offers to babysit for Lydie and her partner. It's an act of quiet generosity that suggests that something has shifted, that after years of selfishness as a means of survival, she is able to consider the needs of someone else. "I think it's the first time seeing that her friend wants something and needs something, and that is, for Agnes, a huge moment," Victor says. "Agnes has struggled to figure out why she's here and how she's meant to feel purposeful, and when she looks at the baby, she's like, 'I can do for you what was done for me [by your mom] later down the line.' "

Those small, intimate transformations are where Victor shines. "Eva is driven by pure curiosity," says Yim. "They have major and endless questions about their world that they are on a tireless mission to answer."

Naomi Ackie and Eva Victor in Sorry Baby, 2025 A24

Victor filmed in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and had close friends stay with them while shooting. There were cats on set, including Noochie, the older cat in the film, and they joke that they had to cut some of Noochie scenes because "he was stealing the show." Their own cat, Clyde, was in Boston with them during production—"but he's not made for film," they say. "He only likes me."

Victor decompressed with baths and weekends of Real Housewives (their favorite is Orange County; "Vicki is my life") and picked up insights from costar Lucas Hedges, who plays Gavin, the gently awkward neighbor Agnes eventually sleeps with. "Something I learned from Lucas—and also this experience—is that your body will tell you when something's a thing for you to work on," says Victor.

Off camera, Victor is goofy, loyal, and deeply perceptive. "Eva is the best person to gossip with because they understand people and they notice everything," Yim says. "They have ideas about why every person is doing and saying what they are doing and saying."

Naomi Ackie, Eva Victor, and Lucas Hedges at the New York screening of Sorry Baby Getty Images

Victor admits they're still catching their breath. "Directing a film is a job? That's insane," they say, laughing. "I'm addicted now." They're protective of their energy but open to joining other people's projects—"if it's the right thing." In their downtime, they've been playing Mario Party on their Switch and doing messy watercolors on the road. ("I like to paint mountain ranges that are just curved blobs.")

And while Sorry, Baby is a deeply personal work, it wasn't made for them alone. "You kind of make a film shouting into the void: 'I feel so crazy. Does anyone else feel like this?' And when someone says yes, that's devastating, but it's also really affirming. We have each other."

As we part ways, the glitter on Victor's eyelid blinks in the sun again, and somehow it feels just right. They are, after all, an artist who wants not just to be seen but to cast light back—hope, however fragile, still intact.

Hair: Edward Lampley for Bumble and Bumble; makeup: Kennedy for Dior Beauty; manicures: Mayumi Abuku for Chanel; casting: Anita Bitton at the Establishment; production: Day Int.; set design: Bette Adams

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