Interview: Naomi Ackie and Lucas Hedges on ‘Sorry, Baby’
It’s hard to believe that Sorry, Baby is Eva Victor‘s filmmaking debut. So stylistically assured and so confident in what it wants to say, the film is a tender, searing look at how trauma manifests itself and how it can bleed into every aspect of a person’s everyday life. It follows Agnes (Victor), a sharp, quietly funny young professor who finds herself emotionally adrift in the aftermath of an unspoken trauma. As friends move on with their lives, she remains stuck in the small New England town where everything changed. When her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) returns for a visit, it forces Agnes to confront how much she’s been holding in, and whether she’s ready to begin again. Told across five time-hopping chapters, the film traces the nonlinear path of healing with tenderness and wit.
Following its Sundance premiere, where it was met with unanimous critical acclaim (the film currently holds a Rotten Tomatoes score of 97%), the film was quickly picked up by A24, who have just released it in theaters. Easily one of the best films of the year so far, Sorry, Baby marks the arrival of a bold new voice in cinema, and announces Eva Victor as an undeniable talent to watch. Aside from Victor’s heartbreaking, quietly haunting performance, the film features standout turns from Naomi Ackie and Lucas Hedges, both who deliver wonderful supporting performances that perfectly complement Victor’s, with Ackie in particular radiating warmth and wit as Lydie, the kind of best friend viewers will wish they had.
“It actually felt super easy,” Ackie says, reflecting on the dynamic between her and Victor. “Eva is quite naturally a very warm and open person. And I think there was a request with actors anyway, like an invisible, silent request that you come open and vulnerable. Most of the time when I’m on a set, within the first day, I know a lot about people. You go deep and you go there quickly because you have to, because you have to get there fast because there’s no time on a set, and so there was that nature of it too.”
That intimacy between Lydie (Ackie) and Agnes, best friends navigating years of change and emotional fallout, was shaped not by rehearsal but by proximity. “We talked, our energies matched, and then the only task was to kind of transfer that onto screen,” she says. “And remember the special things we were creating off screen for when the camera said hi — because cameras talk.”
Ackie recalls the fluidity of working with Victor, who moved seamlessly between writer, director, and actor. “It was actually quite a seamless process watching them change roles,” she says. “It’s always really special. Because when you’re acting, you’re kind of self-directing yourself… So it was also watching Eva feel that out and then be able to see that on screen.”
Hedges, who plays Gavin, Agnes’s quietly attentive neighbor and eventual love interest, puts it simply: “We were all meant to be there.” He continues, “There are just like, the tracks were all laid, and we belonged on those tracks. We just had to keep going.”
For him, part of what made the experience so special was Victor’s demeanor on set. “I’ve said this before, but I always felt like Eva was really actually composed and calm,” he says. “Oftentimes I feel like directors are the most stressed out people on the set and can sometimes have a bad vibe… but because the project was so necessary, and so like, you could tell that Eva was so in her purpose doing it, she couldn’t become this unpleasant person — because it was what we were all meant to do.”
Both actors describe a kind of invisible rhythm to the work, one that required trust, quiet observation, and a sensitivity to Victor’s writing, which leans heavily into naturalism.
Ackie recalls the direction she received as being more about instinct than mechanics. “I think a lot of the notes were more of an encouragement of the naturalistic nature of the script — how to stay true to that and trust that rhythm,” she says. “Because when you’re just actually communicating, it’s not Shakespearean… there’s space, there’s natural space and hesitations while you’re thinking something through. And that was sometimes more of a challenge to capture than others.”
And when it came to building the subtle relationship between Agnes and Gavin, Hedges speaks of it almost spiritually. “You can’t fake compatibility. If you’re not compatible with somebody, there’s no amount of work you can do to make it work,” he says. “But with this, it was like, there’s a magic to it. There’s a light shining, a spotlight showing on all of us.”
SORRY, BABY is now playing in theaters in the US.