‘I’m coming!’ squeals Eva Victor. ‘Oh my god, you’ll have to change all the planes to make me not come. I’m so excited!’ This is what having your feature debut open the Edinburgh International Film Festival can do to a person. But then Victor has been to the Scottish capital before, when she brought an improv show to the Fringe in 2013. ‘No one went… boy, that was humbling,’ laughs the filmmaker.

Chances are she’ll be faced with a full house when she brings Sorry, Baby to the EIFF. Tender, bittersweet and bitingly funny, the acclaimed film (which she wrote, directed and stars in) has already premiered at Sundance, where it won Victor the prestigious Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, before going on to close the Directors’ Fortnight strand in Cannes. Some five years in the works (first scripted during the pandemic), it’s been a long process to get it from conception to projection, but one that’s been highly gratifying. ‘It’s a very bizarre experience that the movie is a movie that exists outside of myself,’ Victor says, when we speak over Zoom the day after the film’s New York premiere. ‘It’s not just this fantasy movie.’

Co-starring with Lucas Hedges and Naomi Ackie, Victor plays Agnes, a New England literature grad student who suffers a sexual assault at the hands of her tutor. ‘It’s a very personal story and it’s also narrative fiction,’ she explains. ‘So I was able to take a lot of emotional truths that felt important for me, to put words onto paper; ideas I wanted to wrap my head around.’ It’s now nearly eight years since the #MeToo movement rose in response to revelations of sexual misconduct surrounding now-jailed movie producer Harvey Weinstein. But the news headlines are still filled with reports of alleged abuse, notably the high-profile P Diddy case this year. ‘I don’t know if it will ever be irrelevant to talk about this,’ says Victor. ‘All I really know is my experience of what was eating at my mind and what I needed to talk about in relation to this topic.’ 

With the sexual assault left off-screen, Sorry, Baby is more a portrait of Agnes, and how she copes with this moment that changes her life forever. ‘The thing that I really wanted to focus on was less about the assault itself and more about the healing process,’ explains Victor, ‘and the time after the assault, and the journey this person is going on to try to unstick themselves from a place that has constant reminders that you’re different from other people.’  

While Victor has roots in the Chicago improv scene, for fans of her best-known TV show Billions, it’s a chance to see her in a very different role. Appearing as Rian in the latter seasons of that series set in the glamorous world of high finance, it was her first major TV role. ‘I was scared of everyone, because they were so hardcore on the show. I was like “oh, they’re all gonna be mean.” And then I got there, and everyone was so kind.’

Now with hip US indie company A24 behind Sorry, Baby, she’s on the precipice of a major filmmaking career. With Edinburgh likely to be one of the last stops on the Sorry, Baby festival tour, Victor intends to make the most of it. She’s already planning to make a beeline for one particular sweet treat. ‘I love Mary’s Milk ice-cream,’ she says, referring to the Grassmarket institution, Mary’s Milk Bar. ‘I’m gonna get that every day.’

Sorry, Baby, Cameo, 14 August, 8.45pm; Filmhouse, 14 August, 9.15pm; Vue, 15 August, 1.15pm; and in cinemas from 22 August.