Victor Conte, the architect of a scheme to provide undetectable performance-enhancing drugs to professional athletes including baseball stars Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and Olympic track champion Marion Jones decades ago, has died. He was 75.
Conte died Monday, SNAC System, a sports nutrition company he founded, said in a social media post. It did not disclose his cause of death.
The federal government’s investigation into another company Conte founded, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, yielded convictions of Jones, elite sprint cyclist Tammy Thomas, and former NFL defensive lineman Dana Stubblefield along with coaches, distributors, a trainer, a chemist and a lawyer.
Conte, who served four months in federal prison for dealing steroids, talked openly about his famous former clients. He went on television to say he had seen three-time Olympic medalist Jones inject herself with human growth hormone, but always stopped short of implicating Bonds, the San Francisco Giants slugger.
The investigation led to the book “Game of Shadows.” A week after the book was published in 2006, baseball Commissioner Bud Selig hired former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell to investigate steroids.
The Steroids Era
Conte said he sold steroids known as “the cream” and “the clear” and advised on their use to dozens of elite athletes, including Giambi, a five-time major league All-Star, the Mitchell report said.
“The illegal use of performance-enhancing substances poses a serious threat to the integrity of the game,” the Mitchell report said. “Widespread use by players of such substances unfairly disadvantages the honest athletes who refuse to use them and raises questions about the validity of baseball records.”
Mitchell said the problems didn’t develop overnight. Mitchell said everyone involved in baseball in the previous two decades — including commissioners, club officials, the players’ association and players — shared some responsibility for what he called “the Steroids Era.”
The federal investigation into BALCO began with a tax agent digging through the company’s trash.
Conte wound up pleading guilty to two of the 42 charges against him in 2005 before trial. Six of the 11 convicted people were ensnared for lying to grand jurors, federal investigators or the court.
Bonds’ personal trainer, Greg Anderson, pleaded guilty to steroid distribution charges stemming from his BALCO connections. Anderson was sentenced to three months in prison and three months of home confinement.
Bonds was charged with lying to a grand jury about receiving performance-enhancing drugs and went on trial in 2011. Prosecutors dropped the case four years later when the government decided not to appeal an overturned obstruction of justice conviction to the Supreme Court.
A seven-time National League MVP and 14-time All-Star outfielder, Bonds ended his career after the 2007 season with 762 homers, surpassing the record of 755 that Hank Aaron set from 1954-76. Bonds denied knowingly using performance-enhancing drugs but has never been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Bonds didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.
Conte told the Associated Press in a 2010 interview that “yes, athletes cheat to win, but the government agents and prosecutors cheat to win, too.” He also questioned whether the results in such legal cases justified the effort.
Conte’s attorney, Robert Holley, didn’t respond to an email and phone call seeking comment. SNAC System didn’t respond to a message sent through the company’s website.
Defiant about his role
After serving his sentence in a minimum security prison he described as “like a men’s retreat,” Conte got back in business in 2007 by resuscitating a nutritional supplements business he had launched two decades earlier called Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning or SNAC System. He located it in the same building that once housed BALCO in Burlingame, Calif.
Conte remained defiant about his central role in doling out designer steroids to elite athletes. He maintained he simply helped “level the playing field” in a world already rife with cheaters.
To Dr. Gary Wadler, a then-member of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Conte might as well have been pushing cocaine or heroin.
“You are talking about totally illegal drug trafficking. You are talking about using drugs in violation of federal law,” Wadler said in 2007. “This is not philanthropy and this is not some do-gooding. This is drug dealing.”
The hallway at SNAC System was lined with game jerseys of pro athletes, and signed photographs, including athletics stars Tim Montgomery, Kelli White and CJ Hunter, all punished for doping.
Conte wore a Rolex and parked a Bentley and a Mercedes in front of his building. He told the AP in 2007 he wouldn’t drive over the speed limit.
“I’m a person who doesn’t break laws anymore,” he said. “But I still do like to look fast.”
Years later, he met with the then-chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Dick Pound.
“As someone who was able to evade their system for so long, it was easy for me to point out the many loopholes that exist and recommend specific steps to improve the overall effectiveness of their program,” Conte said in a statement after the meeting.
He said that some of the poor decisions he made in the past made him uniquely qualified to contribute to the anti-doping effort.
SNAC System’s social media post announcing Conte’s death called him an “Anti-Doping Advocate.”
Conte was also a musician, serving as a bass player for the funk band Tower of Power for a short time in the late 1970s. He is pictured on the back of the band’s 1978 “We Came To Play” album.
“He was an excellent musician and a powerful force for clean sports and he will be missed,” band founder Emilio Castillo posted on X.
Associated Press sports writers Janie McCauley and Chris Lehourites contributed to this report.
A crackdown by armed forces in Cameroon has killed at least four opposition supporters amid protests over the declared re-election win by President Paul Biya.
Protesters calling for fair results from the African country’s contested presidential election held on October 12 have hit the streets in several cities as 92-year-old Biya prepares for an eighth term, which could keep him in power until 2032 as he nears 100.
Biya, whose election win was finally confirmed by Cameroon’s Constitutional Council on Monday, is Africa’s oldest and among the world’s longest ruling leaders. He has spent 43 years – nearly half his life – in office. He has ruled Cameroon, a country of 30 million people, as president since 1982 through elections that political opponents said have been “stolen”.
Cameroonian President Paul Biya casts his ballot as his wife, Chantal, watches during the presidential election in Yaounde, Cameroon, on October 12, 2025 [Zohra Bensemra/Reuters]
What’s behind the deadly protests?
Supporters of opposition candidate Issa Tchiroma Bakary of the Front for the National Salvation of Cameroon party have defied a ban on protests, setting police cars on fire, barricading roads and burning tyres in the financial capital, Douala, before the announcement of the election result. Around 30 activists have been arrested.
Police fired tear gas and water cannon to break up the crowds that came out in support of Tchiroma, who had declared himself the real winner, and called for Biya to concede.
Samuel Dieudonne Ivaha Diboua, the governor of the region that includes Douala, told the AFP news agency that the protesters attacked police stations in the second and sixth districts of the city.
Several members of the security forces were wounded, and “four people unfortunately lost their lives,” he said. Tchiroma’s campaign team confirmed the deaths on Sunday were of protesters.
Opposition supporters claim the results of the election have been rigged by Biya and his supporters in power. In the lead-up to the announcement of the result, the current government rejected these accusations and urged people to wait for the result.
Who is the main opposition in Cameroon?
The Union for Change is a coalition of opposition parties that formed in September to counter Biya’s dominance of the political landscape.
The forum brought together more than two dozen political parties and civil society groups in opposition to Biya with an aim to field a consensus candidate.
In September, the group confirmed Tchiroma as its consensus candidate to run against Biya.
Tchiroma, 76, was formerly part of Biya’s government, holding several ministerial positions over 16 years. He also served as government spokesperson during the years of fighting the Boko Haram armed group, and he defended the army when it stood accused of killing civilians. He was once regarded as a member of Biya’s “old guard” but has campaigned on a promise of “change”.
What happened after the election?
After voting ended on October 12, Tchiroma claimed victory.
“Our victory is clear. It must be respected,” he said in a video statement posted on Facebook. He called on Biya to “accept the truth of the ballot box” or “plunge the country into turmoil”.
Tchiroma claimed that he had won the election with 55 percent of the vote. More than 8 million people were registered to vote in the election.
On Monday, however, the Constitutional Council announced Biya as the winner with 53.66 percent of the vote.
It said Tchiroma was the runner-up with 35.19 percent.
Announcing the results on Monday, the council’s leader, Clement Atangana, said the electoral process was “peaceful” and criticised the opposition for “anticipating the result”.
Members of the security forces detain a supporter of Cameroonian presidential candidate Issa Tchiroma Bakary during a protest in Douala on October 26, 2025 [Zohra Bensemra/Reuters]
What are the main criticisms of Biya?
Under Biya’s rule, Cameroon has struggled with myriad challenges, including chronic corruption that critics say has dampened economic growth despite the country being rich in resources such as oil and cocoa.
The president, who has clinched wins in eight heavily contested elections held every seven years, is renowned for his absenteeism as he reportedly spends extended periods away from the country.
The 92-year-old appeared at just one campaign rally in the lead-up to this month’s election when he promised voters that “the best is still to come.”
He and his entourage are often away on private or medical treatment trips to Switzerland. An investigation in 2018 by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project found Biya had spent at least 1,645 days (nearly four and a half years) in the European country, excluding official visits, since being in power.
Under Biya, opposition politicians have frequently accused electoral authorities of colluding with the president to rig elections. In 2008, parliament voted to remove the limit on the number of terms a president may serve.
Before the election, the Constitutional Council barred another popular opposition candidate, Maurice Kamto of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement, from running.
Some opposition leaders and their supporters have been detained by police on a slew of charges, including plotting violence.
On Friday, two prominent leaders, Anicet Ekane and Djeukam Tchameni of the Union for Change, were arrested.
The African Movement for New Independence and Democracy party also said its treasurer and other members had been “kidnapped” by local security forces, a move it claimed was designed “to intimidate Cameroonians”.
Analysts also said Biya’s hold on power could lead to instability when he eventually goes.
What is the security situation in Cameroon?
Since 2015, attacks by the armed group, Boko Haram, have become more and more frequent in the Far North Region of the country.
Furthermore, since gaining independence in 1960 from French rule, Cameroon has struggled with conflict rooted in the country’s deep linguistic and political divisions, which developed when French- and English-speaking regions were merged into a single state.
French is the official language, and Anglophone Cameroonians in the northwest and southwest have felt increasingly marginalised by the Francophone-dominated government in Yaounde.
Their grievances – over language, education, courts and distribution of resources – turned into mass protests in 2016 when teachers and lawyers demanded equal recognition of English-language institutions.
The government responded with arrests and internet blackouts, and the situation eventually built up to an armed separatist struggle for an independent state called Ambazonia.
The recent presidential election was the first to take place since the conflict intensified. Armed separatists have barred the Anglophone population from participating in government-organised activities, such as National Day celebrations and elections.
As a result, the Southwest and Northwest regions saw widespread abstention in voting on October 12 with a 53 percent turnout. The highest share of votes, according to the official results, went to Biya: 68.7 percent and 86.31 percent in the two regions, respectively.
People walk past motorcycle taxi riders along a muddy road in Douala, Cameroon, on October 4, 2025 [Reuters]
What will happen now?
Protests are likely to spread, observers said.
After the deaths of four protesters before the results were announced, Tchiroma paid tribute “to those who fell to the bullets of a regime that has become criminal during a peaceful march”.
He called on Biya’s government to “stop these acts of barbarity, these killings and arbitrary arrests”.
“Tell the truth of the ballots, or we will all mobilise and march peacefully,” he said.
“Frankenstein” has haunted Guillermo del Toro since he was a kid who barely reached the Creature’s knees. Back in 2011, the writer-director was already tinkering with a version of the monster that resembled a blend of Iggy Pop and Boris Karloff with jagged sutures, gaunt wrinkles and a crushed nose. Since then, Del Toro has made changes. The 2025 model is played by Jacob Elordi, a 6-foot-5 actor often cast as the ideal human specimen in movies like “Saltburn” and who here howls to life with handsome features and rock star swagger. But your eyes keep staring at his pale, smooth seams. He doesn’t look hand-stitched — he looks a little like a modern android.
Of course he does. The decades have given Del Toro time to think about what truly scares him. It’s not monsters. He loves all disfigured nasties, be they swamp creatures, eyeball-less ogres or bolt-headed Hellboys. It’s tech bros, like the ones weaseling into Hollywood, who give their every innovation a sterile sheen.
“Frankenstein” is the director’s lifelong passion project: He doesn’t just want to make a “Frankenstein” but the “Frankenstein,” so he’s faithfully set his adaptation in the past. But he’s adjusted the wiring so that 1850s Europe reminds us of Silicon Valley. The result is the best movie of his career.
This Baron Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is a short-sighted egomaniac who barks over his critics while jabbing the air with his fingers. “I fail to see why modesty is considered a virtue,” he says with a snort.
And Del Toro has written Victor an enabler: a deep-pocketed investor named Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz) who struts into Victor’s science lecture hunting for a whizkid to crack the code to immortality. With his gold-heeled shoes and a confidence that he’s too rich to die, Waltz’s wealthy arms dealer is a 19th century take on venture capitalists like Bryan Johnson and Peter Thiel who’ve been poking into the feasibility of pumping their veins with young blood.
“Don’t be a reasonable man,” Henrich advises Victor. The assumption is — and remains — that tycoons and geniuses deserve to run rampant. Great success demands an indifference to the rules. And if you’re wondering whether money or brains has more power, there’s a scene in which Henrich uses a chamber pot and smugly orders Victor to “flush that for me.”
Del Toro is wired into the outrage in Mary Shelley’s sly 1818 novel, a nightmarish satire about men who care only about yelling “first!” without asking what horrors come next. Centuries ago, she warned of man’s ill-considered rush to create artificial intelligence. Today, Dr. Frankenstein’s descendants keep promising that AI won’t destroy civilization while ignoring Shelley’s point, that the inventor is more dangerous than his monster.
Victor, a stunted man-child who drinks milk served by a sommelier, is frozen in the I’ll-show-him stage of growing up with an abusive father (Charles Dance) who whipped him when he got a wrong answer on his schoolwork. Victor’s name, we’re reminded, means “winner,” a symbol of the pressure he’s under to excel.
Isaac plays him with a pitchman’s exuberance that sags as the corners of his mouth wrench down in disappointment. He’s hacked how to make a disembodied head moan in agony. But having rarely felt affection, Victor doesn’t know how to generate that emotion at all. Worse, it hasn’t occurred to him to think past the triumph of his product launch, that his Creature can’t be readily unplugged. The only kind characters in the movie are a rural blind man (David Bradley) and the moth-like Mia Goth, double-cast as Victor’s mother, Claire, and his brother’s fiancee, Elizabeth. A convent girl with a creepy streak, Elizabeth sees beauty in biology, leaning over a corpse’s flayed back to appreciate the intricacy of its ventricles. But the more she studies Victor, the less impressed she gets.
Because Shelley came up with “Frankenstein” as an 18-year-old newlywed who’d just lost a baby, her message gets boiled down to gender: Women birth life, men mimic it. Really, the feminine strength of the book lies in its foxy, shifting narration that opens with a prologue from an Arctic explorer who’s gotten his sailors trapped in the ice, before transitioning to Victor’s story and then the Creature’s. Like a hostess who secretly loathes her guests, Shelley encourages her characters to flatter themselves and expose their braggadocio.
Del Toro has kept that tactic and he’s kept the book’s structure. But within that framework, he’s changed nearly everything else to make Victor more culpable. Unlike the 1931 film, there’s no Igor and no excuse of accidentally using the wrong brain. This Victor does his own dirty work and what goes wrong is his fault. Meanwhile, Del Toro amps up the action, starting the film off with a ghastly great sequence in which Elordi’s Creature punches a sailor so hard his spine snaps into a backward somersault.
“What manner of devil made him?” the Captain (Lars Mikkelsen) exclaims. Victor guiltily explains why he played God.
Being a futurist isn’t bad. Henrich, an early adopter of daguerreotype cameras, shoots photographs of women posing with skulls like he’s paving the way for Del Toro’s whole filmography. But pompous Henrich and Victor don’t appreciate that their accomplishments are built on other’s sacrifices. When the cinematographer Dan Laustsen pans across a battlefield of dead soldiers, it feels like a silent scream. Henrich made his fortune killing these men; now, Victor will salvage their body parts.
Del Toro delights in the kinetic gusto of the tale, the grotesquerie of cracking limbs and blood sloshing about Victor’s shoes. In the laboratory, dead leaves and buzzing flies whirl through the air as if to keep up with the inventor’s wild ambitions and Alexandre Desplat’s swirling orchestral score. The production design by Tamara Deverell is superb as are the costumes by Kate Hawley, who shrouds Goth in dramatic chiffon layers and dresses laced to highlight her vertebrae. (This movie loves bones as much as Sir Mix-A-Lot loved backs.)
As Victor rudely flings around torsos and limbs, it’s clear that he only values life if it’s branded with his name. So yes, of course, Elordi’s Creature looks good. He’s been assembled from the choicest bits of man flesh to show off the talent of his creator, not so different from Steve Jobs caressing samples of brushed aluminum. When Elordi’s Creature pleads for a companion, a sliver of sculpted abs peeking out from under five hulking layers of wool and fur, you expect half the audience’s hands to shoot up and volunteer.
Elordi has adopted one or two of Karloff’s mannerisms: the arms outstretched in search of warmth, the lurching walk. You can see that he’s a tad lopsided on the left side, presumably because Victor couldn’t find matching femurs. Mostly, he’s his own monster, neither the calculating serial murderer of the book nor Karloff’s reactive, animalistic killer, but a scapegoat who finally starts leveling his foes with bone-breaking efficiency.
Towering over Victor by almost a foot, Elordi’s Creature dwarfs his creator physically, morally and emotionally. There’s anguish in his eyes, and when Del Toro shows us the world through his perspective, humanity itself appears anti-life, a pestilence that destroys without hesitation.
There’s a pack of digital wolves that just looks silly. Otherwise, you trust how intensely Del Toro has doted upon every detail. I was flummoxed by a row of servants flanking young Victor (Christian Convery) who appeared to be wearing gauzy bags over their heads. What are those for? My theory is it’s a tribute to the veil Karloff sported during lunch breaks, so as not to frighten any pregnant secretaries on the Universal lot.
Eschewing mobs of pitchfork-wielding villagers, Del Toro focuses on Victor’s inability to parent his unholy son. And while the end stretch gets a bit too stiff and speechy, particularly with a line that Victor is the “true monster,” I loved the moment when the Creature, venting on behalf of all frustrated children however big they‘ve grown, growls, “The miracle is not that I should speak but that you would listen.”
This deservedly anticipated “Frankenstein” transforms that loneliness into stunning tableaux of Victor and his immortal Creature tethered together by their mutual self-loathing. One man’s heart never turned on. One can’t get his heart to turn off. Ours breaks.
England lock Victor Radley has ruled himself out of the three-Test autumn series against Australia, a week after his club Sydney Roosters banned him for 10 matches.
The Roosters banned Radley after he was implicated in a drug investigation into former team-mate Brandon Smith.
Radley, 27, has not been charged by police. Smith, who appeared before magistrates in Queensland last week, is planning to contest police allegations that he supplied drugs and disclosed inside information for illegal betting.
At the time they suspended Radley, the Roosters said in a statement he had brought the National Rugby League club into disrepute in relation to “allegedly obtaining an illegal substance”.
Three Premier League clubs are keen on Randal Kolo Muani, Alejandro Garnacho is still pushing for a move to Chelsea and the Blues’ move for Xavi Simons has hit a snag.
Tottenham, Manchester United and Newcastle are monitoring the situation of Paris St-Germain striker Randal Kolo Muani, 26, after the French international’s move to Juventus stalled. (Le Parisien – in French), external
Manchester United’s Argentine winger Alejandro Garnacho, 21, is still keen on a move to Chelsea as he attempts to leave Old Trafford this summer.(Fabrizio Romano), external
Chelsea’s bid to sign RB Leipzig’s Dutch forward Xavi Simons, 22, has hit a snag as the Bundesliga side do not want any of the Premier League club’s squad players in part-exchange. (Sun), external
Valencia are closing in on a new deal for Spanish midfielder Javi Guerra, 22, who is attracting interest from Manchester United and AC Milan. (Marca – in Spanish), external
West Ham have submitted a bid worth 8m euros (£6.9m) for Botafogo’s Brazilian goalkeeper John Victor, 29, while Galatasaray, Everton and Manchester United have previously shown interest. (Fabrizio Romano), external
Lyon are in talks with Liverpool over a possible deal for English midfielder Tyler Morton, 22. (Sky Sports), external
Manchester City are willing to sell English midfielders Jack Grealish, 29, James McAtee, 22, and 29-year-old Kalvin Phillips, as well as German keeper Stefan Ortega, 32, this summer, provided they receive suitable offers. (Athletic – subscription required), external
AZ Alkmaar left-back David Moller Wolfe, 23, is travelling to England for a medical at Wolves, with the Norwegian set for a £12m move. (Sky Sports), external
Atalanta have rejected a £36.5m bid from Inter for Nigeria winger Ademola Lookman as they hold out for at least £43.5m for the 27-year-old. (Fabrizio Romano), external
Middlesbrough have agreed a deal worth £3.5m for Blackburn’s English right-back Callum Brittain, 27. (Sky Sports), external
Arsenal are in talks to sign Sporting’s prolific Sweden striker Viktor Gyokeres.
As first revealed by BBC Sport on Thursday, Arsenal have had a clear focus on completing a deal for the 27-year-old in recent days and the club are now advancing in their pursuit of the forward.
Discussions over personal terms for Gyokeres and with the Lisbon club over a transfer fee are accelerating, with Arsenal’s sporting director Andrea Berta leading negotiations.
A deal has not been finalised though, and there remains a degree of caution at Arsenal until agreements are reached.
Gyokeres has been heavily linked with a move to the Premier League after scoring 97 goals in 102 matches during two seasons in Portugal.
But the movement towards a deal for Gyokeres represents a significant development in Arsenal’s summer transfer business given a new striker was the club’s main priority.
It is expected that Gyokeres, who spent three years as a youngster at Brighton and whose career took off during two seasons at Coventry City, would cost about £70m.
There is a simple tattoo of a windowpane on the middle finger of Eva Victor’s right hand. When I ask about it, the filmmaker launches into a story that involves miscommunication with an Italian tattoo artist while on a trip to Paris.
“I drew this really intricate fine-line tattoo of a window with all these curtains and little things in it,” explains Victor. “And I went to the woman and she was like, ‘I cannot do that.’ And I was like, ‘OK, what can you do?’ And she drew a box with lines in it and I was like, “OK, let’s do that.’ And she did it.”
With a little distance and perspective, what could have been a permanent disaster now means something else.
“It seriously is a really rough tattoo,” Victor adds with a lighthearted laugh. “But, you know, life is life. And that’s my tattoo and I have it on my hand every day of my life.”
Much like “Sorry, Baby,” the debut feature that Victor wrote, directed and starred in, the tattoo story is one that begins in odd whimsy but takes an unexpected turn toward something deeper, a personal journey.
“I have a lot of tattoos that are day-of tattoos,” Victor, 31, says. “Sometimes with big decisions I find it’s easier to just do it. It matters more to me that I’m doing this than what it is.
Seeing it every day, the little window is a reminder of another life. “It is definitely like a memory of a person I was who would do something like that,” she adds.
“Sorry, Baby” premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and was picked up for distribution by indie powerhouse A24. The film more recently played at Cannes and opens in limited release this week.
Told via a literary-inspired chapter structure across five years, the story follows Agnes (Victor), a professor at the small East Coast liberal arts college where she was also a grad student, as she tenuously recovers from the free fall following a sexual assault by one of her instructors. Naomi Ackie (also recently seen in “Blink Twice” and “Mickey 17”) brings an openhearted allegiance to Agnes’ best friend Lydie, who, over the course of the film, comes out as gay, marries a woman and has a baby, while Lucas Hedges plays a sympathetic neighbor.
Eva Victor in the movie “Sorry, Baby.”
(A24)
It’s a recent quiet Monday morning at a West Hollywood vegetarian restaurant where we meet and Victor, who uses they/she pronouns and identifies as queer, peruses the menu with a mix of curiosity and enthusiasm.
Victor is a self-described pescatarian but will make the odd exception for a slider at a fancy party or a bite of the pork and green chile stew at Dunsmoor in Glassell Park, a favorite. Having moved to Los Angeles a little over a year ago to work on the editing of “Sorry, Baby,” Victor has settled into living in Silver Lake with their cat, Clyde.
“I love it — I do,” Victor says with quiet conviction. “It’s very comforting. I have all my little things I get when I’m home, but it’s been a while since I’ve been home for a bit. So I’m looking forward to being able to rest at home soon.”
After breakfast, Victor will head to the airport to go shoot a small acting part in an unnamed project and by the end of the week will make a talk show debut with an appearance on the “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”
“It’s been very intense for me,” Victor says of the period following Sundance. “I’m very interested in my privacy and also in routine of the day. I really like having things I do every day. It’s weird to go from making a movie for four years, basically, that nobody knows about. And then it premieres at Sundance and that’s how people find out about it and everyone finds out about it in the same night. That is a very bizarre experience for the body.”
Victor adds, “It does feel like there are a lot of layers between me and the film at this point.”
There’s an unusual, angular physicality to Victor’s performance in “Sorry, Baby,” as Agnes struggles to reengage with her own body following the assault, mostly referred to in the film as “the bad thing.”
“I keep hearing, ‘Oh, Agnes is so awkward.’ I’m like, ‘What the hell?’” says Victor, protectively. “I’m very humbled by people’s reactions to how bizarre they think that character is because I’m like: ‘Oh, I thought she was acting legitimately normal, but OK.’”
“It’s life-affirming for me to know that I wrote the film in a leap-of-faith way to be like: ‘Is anyone else feeling like this?’” says Victor. “And it’s nice to know that there are people who are understanding what that is.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Victor, grew up in San Francisco and studied playwriting and acting at Northwestern University, moving to New York City after graduation with ambitions to work as a staffer on a late-night talk show. She got a job writing for the satirical website Reductress and began making short online videos of herself, many of which became offbeat viral comedy hits for the way they jabbed at contemporary culture, including “me explaining to my boyfriend why we’re going to straight pride” and “me when I def did not murder my husband,” and “the girl from the movie who doesn’t believe in love.” She also appeared as a performer on the final three seasons of the series “Billions.”
The character sketches of those videos only hinted at the nuance and complexity of which Victor was capable. Throughout “Sorry, Baby” there is a care and delicacy to how the most sensitive and vulnerable moments are handled. In the film, the sexual assault itself occurs offscreen — we don’t see it or hear it — as a shot of the facade of the teacher’s house depicts the passage of time from day to night. Later, Agnes sits in the bath as she describes to Lydie what happened, a moment made all the more disarming for the tinges of humor that Victor still manages to bring.
“At the end of the day, I really wanted to make a film about trying to heal,” Victor says. “And about love getting you through really hard times. And so the violence is not depicted in the film and not structurally the big plot point of the film. The big plot point of the film in my opinion is Agnes telling Lydie what happened and her holding it very well. That to me is sort of what we’re building to in the film — these moments in friendship over time and the loneliness of a person in between those moments.”
The relationship between Agnes and Lydie forms much of the core of “Sorry, Baby,” with the chemistry between Victor and Ackie giving off a rare warmth and understanding. The connection between the two actors as performers happened straight away.
“The script was so incredible that, to be honest with you, I already felt like I knew them,” says Ackie on a Zoom call from New York City. “There was something about the rhythm of how the writing was that made me feel like we might have something in common. When I was reading it to myself, it felt so natural in my mouth. And then we finally met and it was like all of the humor and the heart and the tragedy of the script was suddenly in a person. There was a sense of ease in the way we were talking and openness and a joyfulness and an excitedness that was kind of instantaneous.”
Naomi Ackie, left, and Eva Victor in the movie “Sorry, Baby.”
(A24)
The film is the product of an unusual development process spurred by producers Barry Jenkins, Adele Romanski and Mark Ceryak. Based on their fandom of Victor’s online videos, Jenkins reached out through DMs and set up a meeting, setting in motion the process that would eventually lead to a screenplay for “Sorry, Baby.”
“When Ava sent the first draft of ‘Sorry, Baby,’ it arrived in the way that the most special things have for me, which is fully formed,” says Romanski. “Not to say that we didn’t then go back and continue to refine it, but it just arrived so clear and so emotional. It hit from the first draft. So it felt like it would be such a shame not to figure out how to put that into a visual form that other people could experience what we were able to experience just from reading it.”
From there, the team set about making Victor feel comfortable and confident as both a filmmaker and a performer. Having already had experience working with first-time feature directors such as Charlotte Wells on “Aftersun” and Raven Jackson on “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” the producing trio knew the process would require extra care and attention.
“Part of the reason this challenge felt possible is how much work we’ve done in how best to support a director in that debut space,” says Romanski. “There was a lot of confidence and assuredness around how to be that producer for that first-time filmmaker.”
The team arranged something of an unofficial directing fellowship, allowing Victor to shoot a few scenes from the script and then sit down with an editor to discuss how to improve on the footage. Victor made shot lists after watching Jenkins’ “Moonlight” and Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women,” leaning further into the mechanics of how to visually construct scenes. Victor also shadowed filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun during production for last year’s acclaimed “I Saw the TV Glow.”
“There was no prescriptive timeline to the course that it took,” explains Romanski. “It was just kind of, we’ll keep finding things to help you fortify and put on directorial muscle mass until you tell us, ‘I’m ready.’ And then when you say, ‘I’m ready,’ we’ll pivot to putting the movie together. There’s no blueprint for this, at least not for us. We haven’t done it quite like this before, but that’s also what’s exciting about it.”
Without ever sharing specifics, the story is rooted in Victor’s personal experience. Going back to some of their earliest press around 2018, Victor would self-describe as a sexual assault survivor. There was material about it in a stand-up comedy routine. (“It didn’t work,” Victor notes, dryly, adding that they longer do stand-up.)
The experience of making the movie and putting it out into the world has been one of potentially being continually retriggered, sent back to emotions and feelings Victor has worked hard to move forward from. Yet the process of making the film began to provide its own rewards.
“The thing about this kind of trauma is it is someone deciding where your body goes without your permission,” Victor says. “And that is surreal and absurd and very difficult. It’s very difficult to make sense of the world after something like that happens.”
The “Sorry, Baby” shoot in Massachusetts last year was a turning point, says Victor, one of validation. “The experience of directing myself as an actor is an experience of saying: This is where my body’s going right now,” says Victor. “And a crew of 60 people being like, ‘Yes.’ It’s this really special experience of being like, ‘I am saying where my body goes’ and everyone agrees. In the making of the film, that was very powerful to me.”
Eva Victor and John Carroll Lynch in the movie “Sorry, Baby.”
(A24)
Even with the success of “Sorry, Baby” and the way it has launched Victor to a new level of attention and acclaim, there is a tinge of melancholy to discovering just how many people are connecting to the film because it speaks to their own experiences.
“It’s a very personal film for a lot of people and there’s a sadness to that because it’s a community of people who have experienced things that they shouldn’t have had to,” says Victor. “It’s life-affirming for me to know that I wrote the film in a leap-of-faith way to be like: ‘Is anyone else feeling like this?’ And it’s nice to know that there are people who are understanding what that is.”
While recently back in France, Victor got another tattoo, this time on her foot, where she doesn’t see it as often.
“Maybe there’s a dash of mental illness in it,” says Victor. “But I think with tattoos, it’s such a good one, because it’s not going to hurt you but it is intense and permanent. So it is risk-taking.”
That attention to a small shift in personal perspective, a change in action and how one approaches the world, is part of what makes “Sorry, Baby” such a powerful experience. And as it now continues to make its way out to more audiences, Victor’s experience with it continues to evolve as well.
“There is a process that’s happening right now where it’s like an exhale. I’m like, whatever will be will be,” Victor says. “Putting something out into the world is a process of letting go of it. And I had my time with it and I got to make it what I wanted it to be. And now it will over time not be mine.”
The experience of making “Sorry, Baby” has pushed Victor forward both professionally and personally, finding catharsis in creativity and community.
“I guess that is the deal,” Victor offers. “That is part of the journey of releasing something. I mean it’s legitimately called a release.”
Victor Conte, BALCO founder behind steroids scandal, dies
Victor Conte, the architect of a scheme to provide undetectable performance-enhancing drugs to professional athletes including baseball stars Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and Olympic track champion Marion Jones decades ago, has died. He was 75.
Conte died Monday, SNAC System, a sports nutrition company he founded, said in a social media post. It did not disclose his cause of death.
The federal government’s investigation into another company Conte founded, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, yielded convictions of Jones, elite sprint cyclist Tammy Thomas, and former NFL defensive lineman Dana Stubblefield along with coaches, distributors, a trainer, a chemist and a lawyer.
Conte, who served four months in federal prison for dealing steroids, talked openly about his famous former clients. He went on television to say he had seen three-time Olympic medalist Jones inject herself with human growth hormone, but always stopped short of implicating Bonds, the San Francisco Giants slugger.
The investigation led to the book “Game of Shadows.” A week after the book was published in 2006, baseball Commissioner Bud Selig hired former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell to investigate steroids.
The Steroids Era
Conte said he sold steroids known as “the cream” and “the clear” and advised on their use to dozens of elite athletes, including Giambi, a five-time major league All-Star, the Mitchell report said.
“The illegal use of performance-enhancing substances poses a serious threat to the integrity of the game,” the Mitchell report said. “Widespread use by players of such substances unfairly disadvantages the honest athletes who refuse to use them and raises questions about the validity of baseball records.”
Mitchell said the problems didn’t develop overnight. Mitchell said everyone involved in baseball in the previous two decades — including commissioners, club officials, the players’ association and players — shared some responsibility for what he called “the Steroids Era.”
The federal investigation into BALCO began with a tax agent digging through the company’s trash.
Conte wound up pleading guilty to two of the 42 charges against him in 2005 before trial. Six of the 11 convicted people were ensnared for lying to grand jurors, federal investigators or the court.
Bonds’ personal trainer, Greg Anderson, pleaded guilty to steroid distribution charges stemming from his BALCO connections. Anderson was sentenced to three months in prison and three months of home confinement.
Bonds was charged with lying to a grand jury about receiving performance-enhancing drugs and went on trial in 2011. Prosecutors dropped the case four years later when the government decided not to appeal an overturned obstruction of justice conviction to the Supreme Court.
A seven-time National League MVP and 14-time All-Star outfielder, Bonds ended his career after the 2007 season with 762 homers, surpassing the record of 755 that Hank Aaron set from 1954-76. Bonds denied knowingly using performance-enhancing drugs but has never been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Bonds didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.
Conte told the Associated Press in a 2010 interview that “yes, athletes cheat to win, but the government agents and prosecutors cheat to win, too.” He also questioned whether the results in such legal cases justified the effort.
Conte’s attorney, Robert Holley, didn’t respond to an email and phone call seeking comment. SNAC System didn’t respond to a message sent through the company’s website.
Defiant about his role
After serving his sentence in a minimum security prison he described as “like a men’s retreat,” Conte got back in business in 2007 by resuscitating a nutritional supplements business he had launched two decades earlier called Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning or SNAC System. He located it in the same building that once housed BALCO in Burlingame, Calif.
Conte remained defiant about his central role in doling out designer steroids to elite athletes. He maintained he simply helped “level the playing field” in a world already rife with cheaters.
To Dr. Gary Wadler, a then-member of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Conte might as well have been pushing cocaine or heroin.
“You are talking about totally illegal drug trafficking. You are talking about using drugs in violation of federal law,” Wadler said in 2007. “This is not philanthropy and this is not some do-gooding. This is drug dealing.”
The hallway at SNAC System was lined with game jerseys of pro athletes, and signed photographs, including athletics stars Tim Montgomery, Kelli White and CJ Hunter, all punished for doping.
Conte wore a Rolex and parked a Bentley and a Mercedes in front of his building. He told the AP in 2007 he wouldn’t drive over the speed limit.
“I’m a person who doesn’t break laws anymore,” he said. “But I still do like to look fast.”
Years later, he met with the then-chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Dick Pound.
“As someone who was able to evade their system for so long, it was easy for me to point out the many loopholes that exist and recommend specific steps to improve the overall effectiveness of their program,” Conte said in a statement after the meeting.
He said that some of the poor decisions he made in the past made him uniquely qualified to contribute to the anti-doping effort.
SNAC System’s social media post announcing Conte’s death called him an “Anti-Doping Advocate.”
Conte was also a musician, serving as a bass player for the funk band Tower of Power for a short time in the late 1970s. He is pictured on the back of the band’s 1978 “We Came To Play” album.
“He was an excellent musician and a powerful force for clean sports and he will be missed,” band founder Emilio Castillo posted on X.
Associated Press sports writers Janie McCauley and Chris Lehourites contributed to this report.
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Biya declared victor of Cameroon election: Why deadly protests broke out | Elections News
A crackdown by armed forces in Cameroon has killed at least four opposition supporters amid protests over the declared re-election win by President Paul Biya.
Protesters calling for fair results from the African country’s contested presidential election held on October 12 have hit the streets in several cities as 92-year-old Biya prepares for an eighth term, which could keep him in power until 2032 as he nears 100.
Biya, whose election win was finally confirmed by Cameroon’s Constitutional Council on Monday, is Africa’s oldest and among the world’s longest ruling leaders. He has spent 43 years – nearly half his life – in office. He has ruled Cameroon, a country of 30 million people, as president since 1982 through elections that political opponents said have been “stolen”.
What’s behind the deadly protests?
Supporters of opposition candidate Issa Tchiroma Bakary of the Front for the National Salvation of Cameroon party have defied a ban on protests, setting police cars on fire, barricading roads and burning tyres in the financial capital, Douala, before the announcement of the election result. Around 30 activists have been arrested.
Police fired tear gas and water cannon to break up the crowds that came out in support of Tchiroma, who had declared himself the real winner, and called for Biya to concede.
Samuel Dieudonne Ivaha Diboua, the governor of the region that includes Douala, told the AFP news agency that the protesters attacked police stations in the second and sixth districts of the city.
Several members of the security forces were wounded, and “four people unfortunately lost their lives,” he said. Tchiroma’s campaign team confirmed the deaths on Sunday were of protesters.
Opposition supporters claim the results of the election have been rigged by Biya and his supporters in power. In the lead-up to the announcement of the result, the current government rejected these accusations and urged people to wait for the result.
Who is the main opposition in Cameroon?
The Union for Change is a coalition of opposition parties that formed in September to counter Biya’s dominance of the political landscape.
The forum brought together more than two dozen political parties and civil society groups in opposition to Biya with an aim to field a consensus candidate.
In September, the group confirmed Tchiroma as its consensus candidate to run against Biya.
Tchiroma, 76, was formerly part of Biya’s government, holding several ministerial positions over 16 years. He also served as government spokesperson during the years of fighting the Boko Haram armed group, and he defended the army when it stood accused of killing civilians. He was once regarded as a member of Biya’s “old guard” but has campaigned on a promise of “change”.
What happened after the election?
After voting ended on October 12, Tchiroma claimed victory.
“Our victory is clear. It must be respected,” he said in a video statement posted on Facebook. He called on Biya to “accept the truth of the ballot box” or “plunge the country into turmoil”.
Tchiroma claimed that he had won the election with 55 percent of the vote. More than 8 million people were registered to vote in the election.
On Monday, however, the Constitutional Council announced Biya as the winner with 53.66 percent of the vote.
It said Tchiroma was the runner-up with 35.19 percent.
Announcing the results on Monday, the council’s leader, Clement Atangana, said the electoral process was “peaceful” and criticised the opposition for “anticipating the result”.
What are the main criticisms of Biya?
Under Biya’s rule, Cameroon has struggled with myriad challenges, including chronic corruption that critics say has dampened economic growth despite the country being rich in resources such as oil and cocoa.
The president, who has clinched wins in eight heavily contested elections held every seven years, is renowned for his absenteeism as he reportedly spends extended periods away from the country.
The 92-year-old appeared at just one campaign rally in the lead-up to this month’s election when he promised voters that “the best is still to come.”
He and his entourage are often away on private or medical treatment trips to Switzerland. An investigation in 2018 by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project found Biya had spent at least 1,645 days (nearly four and a half years) in the European country, excluding official visits, since being in power.
Under Biya, opposition politicians have frequently accused electoral authorities of colluding with the president to rig elections. In 2008, parliament voted to remove the limit on the number of terms a president may serve.
Before the election, the Constitutional Council barred another popular opposition candidate, Maurice Kamto of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement, from running.
Some opposition leaders and their supporters have been detained by police on a slew of charges, including plotting violence.
On Friday, two prominent leaders, Anicet Ekane and Djeukam Tchameni of the Union for Change, were arrested.
The African Movement for New Independence and Democracy party also said its treasurer and other members had been “kidnapped” by local security forces, a move it claimed was designed “to intimidate Cameroonians”.
Analysts also said Biya’s hold on power could lead to instability when he eventually goes.
What is the security situation in Cameroon?
Since 2015, attacks by the armed group, Boko Haram, have become more and more frequent in the Far North Region of the country.
Furthermore, since gaining independence in 1960 from French rule, Cameroon has struggled with conflict rooted in the country’s deep linguistic and political divisions, which developed when French- and English-speaking regions were merged into a single state.
French is the official language, and Anglophone Cameroonians in the northwest and southwest have felt increasingly marginalised by the Francophone-dominated government in Yaounde.
Their grievances – over language, education, courts and distribution of resources – turned into mass protests in 2016 when teachers and lawyers demanded equal recognition of English-language institutions.
The government responded with arrests and internet blackouts, and the situation eventually built up to an armed separatist struggle for an independent state called Ambazonia.
The recent presidential election was the first to take place since the conflict intensified. Armed separatists have barred the Anglophone population from participating in government-organised activities, such as National Day celebrations and elections.
As a result, the Southwest and Northwest regions saw widespread abstention in voting on October 12 with a 53 percent turnout. The highest share of votes, according to the official results, went to Biya: 68.7 percent and 86.31 percent in the two regions, respectively.
What will happen now?
Protests are likely to spread, observers said.
After the deaths of four protesters before the results were announced, Tchiroma paid tribute “to those who fell to the bullets of a regime that has become criminal during a peaceful march”.
He called on Biya’s government to “stop these acts of barbarity, these killings and arbitrary arrests”.
“Tell the truth of the ballots, or we will all mobilise and march peacefully,” he said.
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‘Frankenstein’ review: Oscar Isaac as an arrogant 1850s tech bro
“Frankenstein” has haunted Guillermo del Toro since he was a kid who barely reached the Creature’s knees. Back in 2011, the writer-director was already tinkering with a version of the monster that resembled a blend of Iggy Pop and Boris Karloff with jagged sutures, gaunt wrinkles and a crushed nose. Since then, Del Toro has made changes. The 2025 model is played by Jacob Elordi, a 6-foot-5 actor often cast as the ideal human specimen in movies like “Saltburn” and who here howls to life with handsome features and rock star swagger. But your eyes keep staring at his pale, smooth seams. He doesn’t look hand-stitched — he looks a little like a modern android.
Of course he does. The decades have given Del Toro time to think about what truly scares him. It’s not monsters. He loves all disfigured nasties, be they swamp creatures, eyeball-less ogres or bolt-headed Hellboys. It’s tech bros, like the ones weaseling into Hollywood, who give their every innovation a sterile sheen.
“Frankenstein” is the director’s lifelong passion project: He doesn’t just want to make a “Frankenstein” but the “Frankenstein,” so he’s faithfully set his adaptation in the past. But he’s adjusted the wiring so that 1850s Europe reminds us of Silicon Valley. The result is the best movie of his career.
This Baron Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is a short-sighted egomaniac who barks over his critics while jabbing the air with his fingers. “I fail to see why modesty is considered a virtue,” he says with a snort.
And Del Toro has written Victor an enabler: a deep-pocketed investor named Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz) who struts into Victor’s science lecture hunting for a whizkid to crack the code to immortality. With his gold-heeled shoes and a confidence that he’s too rich to die, Waltz’s wealthy arms dealer is a 19th century take on venture capitalists like Bryan Johnson and Peter Thiel who’ve been poking into the feasibility of pumping their veins with young blood.
“Don’t be a reasonable man,” Henrich advises Victor. The assumption is — and remains — that tycoons and geniuses deserve to run rampant. Great success demands an indifference to the rules. And if you’re wondering whether money or brains has more power, there’s a scene in which Henrich uses a chamber pot and smugly orders Victor to “flush that for me.”
Del Toro is wired into the outrage in Mary Shelley’s sly 1818 novel, a nightmarish satire about men who care only about yelling “first!” without asking what horrors come next. Centuries ago, she warned of man’s ill-considered rush to create artificial intelligence. Today, Dr. Frankenstein’s descendants keep promising that AI won’t destroy civilization while ignoring Shelley’s point, that the inventor is more dangerous than his monster.
Victor, a stunted man-child who drinks milk served by a sommelier, is frozen in the I’ll-show-him stage of growing up with an abusive father (Charles Dance) who whipped him when he got a wrong answer on his schoolwork. Victor’s name, we’re reminded, means “winner,” a symbol of the pressure he’s under to excel.
Isaac plays him with a pitchman’s exuberance that sags as the corners of his mouth wrench down in disappointment. He’s hacked how to make a disembodied head moan in agony. But having rarely felt affection, Victor doesn’t know how to generate that emotion at all. Worse, it hasn’t occurred to him to think past the triumph of his product launch, that his Creature can’t be readily unplugged. The only kind characters in the movie are a rural blind man (David Bradley) and the moth-like Mia Goth, double-cast as Victor’s mother, Claire, and his brother’s fiancee, Elizabeth. A convent girl with a creepy streak, Elizabeth sees beauty in biology, leaning over a corpse’s flayed back to appreciate the intricacy of its ventricles. But the more she studies Victor, the less impressed she gets.
Because Shelley came up with “Frankenstein” as an 18-year-old newlywed who’d just lost a baby, her message gets boiled down to gender: Women birth life, men mimic it. Really, the feminine strength of the book lies in its foxy, shifting narration that opens with a prologue from an Arctic explorer who’s gotten his sailors trapped in the ice, before transitioning to Victor’s story and then the Creature’s. Like a hostess who secretly loathes her guests, Shelley encourages her characters to flatter themselves and expose their braggadocio.
Del Toro has kept that tactic and he’s kept the book’s structure. But within that framework, he’s changed nearly everything else to make Victor more culpable. Unlike the 1931 film, there’s no Igor and no excuse of accidentally using the wrong brain. This Victor does his own dirty work and what goes wrong is his fault. Meanwhile, Del Toro amps up the action, starting the film off with a ghastly great sequence in which Elordi’s Creature punches a sailor so hard his spine snaps into a backward somersault.
“What manner of devil made him?” the Captain (Lars Mikkelsen) exclaims. Victor guiltily explains why he played God.
Being a futurist isn’t bad. Henrich, an early adopter of daguerreotype cameras, shoots photographs of women posing with skulls like he’s paving the way for Del Toro’s whole filmography. But pompous Henrich and Victor don’t appreciate that their accomplishments are built on other’s sacrifices. When the cinematographer Dan Laustsen pans across a battlefield of dead soldiers, it feels like a silent scream. Henrich made his fortune killing these men; now, Victor will salvage their body parts.
Del Toro delights in the kinetic gusto of the tale, the grotesquerie of cracking limbs and blood sloshing about Victor’s shoes. In the laboratory, dead leaves and buzzing flies whirl through the air as if to keep up with the inventor’s wild ambitions and Alexandre Desplat’s swirling orchestral score. The production design by Tamara Deverell is superb as are the costumes by Kate Hawley, who shrouds Goth in dramatic chiffon layers and dresses laced to highlight her vertebrae. (This movie loves bones as much as Sir Mix-A-Lot loved backs.)
As Victor rudely flings around torsos and limbs, it’s clear that he only values life if it’s branded with his name. So yes, of course, Elordi’s Creature looks good. He’s been assembled from the choicest bits of man flesh to show off the talent of his creator, not so different from Steve Jobs caressing samples of brushed aluminum. When Elordi’s Creature pleads for a companion, a sliver of sculpted abs peeking out from under five hulking layers of wool and fur, you expect half the audience’s hands to shoot up and volunteer.
Elordi has adopted one or two of Karloff’s mannerisms: the arms outstretched in search of warmth, the lurching walk. You can see that he’s a tad lopsided on the left side, presumably because Victor couldn’t find matching femurs. Mostly, he’s his own monster, neither the calculating serial murderer of the book nor Karloff’s reactive, animalistic killer, but a scapegoat who finally starts leveling his foes with bone-breaking efficiency.
Towering over Victor by almost a foot, Elordi’s Creature dwarfs his creator physically, morally and emotionally. There’s anguish in his eyes, and when Del Toro shows us the world through his perspective, humanity itself appears anti-life, a pestilence that destroys without hesitation.
There’s a pack of digital wolves that just looks silly. Otherwise, you trust how intensely Del Toro has doted upon every detail. I was flummoxed by a row of servants flanking young Victor (Christian Convery) who appeared to be wearing gauzy bags over their heads. What are those for? My theory is it’s a tribute to the veil Karloff sported during lunch breaks, so as not to frighten any pregnant secretaries on the Universal lot.
Eschewing mobs of pitchfork-wielding villagers, Del Toro focuses on Victor’s inability to parent his unholy son. And while the end stretch gets a bit too stiff and speechy, particularly with a line that Victor is the “true monster,” I loved the moment when the Creature, venting on behalf of all frustrated children however big they‘ve grown, growls, “The miracle is not that I should speak but that you would listen.”
This deservedly anticipated “Frankenstein” transforms that loneliness into stunning tableaux of Victor and his immortal Creature tethered together by their mutual self-loathing. One man’s heart never turned on. One can’t get his heart to turn off. Ours breaks.
‘Frankenstein’
Rated: R, for bloody violence and grisly images
Running time: 2 hours, 29 minutes
Playing: In limited release Friday, Oct. 17
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Victor Radley: England lock rules himself out of Australia Test series
England lock Victor Radley has ruled himself out of the three-Test autumn series against Australia, a week after his club Sydney Roosters banned him for 10 matches.
The Roosters banned Radley after he was implicated in a drug investigation into former team-mate Brandon Smith.
Radley, 27, has not been charged by police. Smith, who appeared before magistrates in Queensland last week, is planning to contest police allegations that he supplied drugs and disclosed inside information for illegal betting.
At the time they suspended Radley, the Roosters said in a statement he had brought the National Rugby League club into disrepute in relation to “allegedly obtaining an illegal substance”.
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Football gossip: Kolo Muani, Garnacho, Simons, Guerra, John Victor
Three Premier League clubs are keen on Randal Kolo Muani, Alejandro Garnacho is still pushing for a move to Chelsea and the Blues’ move for Xavi Simons has hit a snag.
Tottenham, Manchester United and Newcastle are monitoring the situation of Paris St-Germain striker Randal Kolo Muani, 26, after the French international’s move to Juventus stalled. (Le Parisien – in French), external
Manchester United’s Argentine winger Alejandro Garnacho, 21, is still keen on a move to Chelsea as he attempts to leave Old Trafford this summer. (Fabrizio Romano), external
Chelsea’s bid to sign RB Leipzig’s Dutch forward Xavi Simons, 22, has hit a snag as the Bundesliga side do not want any of the Premier League club’s squad players in part-exchange. (Sun), external
Valencia are closing in on a new deal for Spanish midfielder Javi Guerra, 22, who is attracting interest from Manchester United and AC Milan. (Marca – in Spanish), external
West Ham have submitted a bid worth 8m euros (£6.9m) for Botafogo’s Brazilian goalkeeper John Victor, 29, while Galatasaray, Everton and Manchester United have previously shown interest. (Fabrizio Romano), external
Lyon are in talks with Liverpool over a possible deal for English midfielder Tyler Morton, 22. (Sky Sports), external
Manchester City are willing to sell English midfielders Jack Grealish, 29, James McAtee, 22, and 29-year-old Kalvin Phillips, as well as German keeper Stefan Ortega, 32, this summer, provided they receive suitable offers. (Athletic – subscription required), external
AZ Alkmaar left-back David Moller Wolfe, 23, is travelling to England for a medical at Wolves, with the Norwegian set for a £12m move. (Sky Sports), external
Inter Milan defender Yann Bisseck, 24, has rejected a move to Crystal Palace, who had a £28m bid accepted for the German. (Gazzetta dello Sport – in Italian), external
Atalanta have rejected a £36.5m bid from Inter for Nigeria winger Ademola Lookman as they hold out for at least £43.5m for the 27-year-old. (Fabrizio Romano), external
Middlesbrough have agreed a deal worth £3.5m for Blackburn’s English right-back Callum Brittain, 27. (Sky Sports), external
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Victor Gyokores transfer news: Arsenal in talks to sign striker
Arsenal are in talks to sign Sporting’s prolific Sweden striker Viktor Gyokeres.
As first revealed by BBC Sport on Thursday, Arsenal have had a clear focus on completing a deal for the 27-year-old in recent days and the club are now advancing in their pursuit of the forward.
Discussions over personal terms for Gyokeres and with the Lisbon club over a transfer fee are accelerating, with Arsenal’s sporting director Andrea Berta leading negotiations.
A deal has not been finalised though, and there remains a degree of caution at Arsenal until agreements are reached.
Gyokeres has been heavily linked with a move to the Premier League after scoring 97 goals in 102 matches during two seasons in Portugal.
The Gunners completed the £60m signing of Martin Zubimendi from Real Sociedad on Sunday.
But the movement towards a deal for Gyokeres represents a significant development in Arsenal’s summer transfer business given a new striker was the club’s main priority.
It is expected that Gyokeres, who spent three years as a youngster at Brighton and whose career took off during two seasons at Coventry City, would cost about £70m.
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‘Sorry, Baby’ was a way for debuting filmmaker Eva Victor to heal
There is a simple tattoo of a windowpane on the middle finger of Eva Victor’s right hand. When I ask about it, the filmmaker launches into a story that involves miscommunication with an Italian tattoo artist while on a trip to Paris.
“I drew this really intricate fine-line tattoo of a window with all these curtains and little things in it,” explains Victor. “And I went to the woman and she was like, ‘I cannot do that.’ And I was like, ‘OK, what can you do?’ And she drew a box with lines in it and I was like, “OK, let’s do that.’ And she did it.”
With a little distance and perspective, what could have been a permanent disaster now means something else.
“It seriously is a really rough tattoo,” Victor adds with a lighthearted laugh. “But, you know, life is life. And that’s my tattoo and I have it on my hand every day of my life.”
Much like “Sorry, Baby,” the debut feature that Victor wrote, directed and starred in, the tattoo story is one that begins in odd whimsy but takes an unexpected turn toward something deeper, a personal journey.
“I have a lot of tattoos that are day-of tattoos,” Victor, 31, says. “Sometimes with big decisions I find it’s easier to just do it. It matters more to me that I’m doing this than what it is.
Seeing it every day, the little window is a reminder of another life. “It is definitely like a memory of a person I was who would do something like that,” she adds.
“Sorry, Baby” premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and was picked up for distribution by indie powerhouse A24. The film more recently played at Cannes and opens in limited release this week.
Told via a literary-inspired chapter structure across five years, the story follows Agnes (Victor), a professor at the small East Coast liberal arts college where she was also a grad student, as she tenuously recovers from the free fall following a sexual assault by one of her instructors. Naomi Ackie (also recently seen in “Blink Twice” and “Mickey 17”) brings an openhearted allegiance to Agnes’ best friend Lydie, who, over the course of the film, comes out as gay, marries a woman and has a baby, while Lucas Hedges plays a sympathetic neighbor.
Eva Victor in the movie “Sorry, Baby.”
(A24)
It’s a recent quiet Monday morning at a West Hollywood vegetarian restaurant where we meet and Victor, who uses they/she pronouns and identifies as queer, peruses the menu with a mix of curiosity and enthusiasm.
Victor is a self-described pescatarian but will make the odd exception for a slider at a fancy party or a bite of the pork and green chile stew at Dunsmoor in Glassell Park, a favorite. Having moved to Los Angeles a little over a year ago to work on the editing of “Sorry, Baby,” Victor has settled into living in Silver Lake with their cat, Clyde.
“I love it — I do,” Victor says with quiet conviction. “It’s very comforting. I have all my little things I get when I’m home, but it’s been a while since I’ve been home for a bit. So I’m looking forward to being able to rest at home soon.”
After breakfast, Victor will head to the airport to go shoot a small acting part in an unnamed project and by the end of the week will make a talk show debut with an appearance on the “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”
“It’s been very intense for me,” Victor says of the period following Sundance. “I’m very interested in my privacy and also in routine of the day. I really like having things I do every day. It’s weird to go from making a movie for four years, basically, that nobody knows about. And then it premieres at Sundance and that’s how people find out about it and everyone finds out about it in the same night. That is a very bizarre experience for the body.”
Victor adds, “It does feel like there are a lot of layers between me and the film at this point.”
There’s an unusual, angular physicality to Victor’s performance in “Sorry, Baby,” as Agnes struggles to reengage with her own body following the assault, mostly referred to in the film as “the bad thing.”
“I keep hearing, ‘Oh, Agnes is so awkward.’ I’m like, ‘What the hell?’” says Victor, protectively. “I’m very humbled by people’s reactions to how bizarre they think that character is because I’m like: ‘Oh, I thought she was acting legitimately normal, but OK.’”
“It’s life-affirming for me to know that I wrote the film in a leap-of-faith way to be like: ‘Is anyone else feeling like this?’” says Victor. “And it’s nice to know that there are people who are understanding what that is.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Victor, grew up in San Francisco and studied playwriting and acting at Northwestern University, moving to New York City after graduation with ambitions to work as a staffer on a late-night talk show. She got a job writing for the satirical website Reductress and began making short online videos of herself, many of which became offbeat viral comedy hits for the way they jabbed at contemporary culture, including “me explaining to my boyfriend why we’re going to straight pride” and “me when I def did not murder my husband,” and “the girl from the movie who doesn’t believe in love.” She also appeared as a performer on the final three seasons of the series “Billions.”
The character sketches of those videos only hinted at the nuance and complexity of which Victor was capable. Throughout “Sorry, Baby” there is a care and delicacy to how the most sensitive and vulnerable moments are handled. In the film, the sexual assault itself occurs offscreen — we don’t see it or hear it — as a shot of the facade of the teacher’s house depicts the passage of time from day to night. Later, Agnes sits in the bath as she describes to Lydie what happened, a moment made all the more disarming for the tinges of humor that Victor still manages to bring.
“At the end of the day, I really wanted to make a film about trying to heal,” Victor says. “And about love getting you through really hard times. And so the violence is not depicted in the film and not structurally the big plot point of the film. The big plot point of the film in my opinion is Agnes telling Lydie what happened and her holding it very well. That to me is sort of what we’re building to in the film — these moments in friendship over time and the loneliness of a person in between those moments.”
The relationship between Agnes and Lydie forms much of the core of “Sorry, Baby,” with the chemistry between Victor and Ackie giving off a rare warmth and understanding. The connection between the two actors as performers happened straight away.
“The script was so incredible that, to be honest with you, I already felt like I knew them,” says Ackie on a Zoom call from New York City. “There was something about the rhythm of how the writing was that made me feel like we might have something in common. When I was reading it to myself, it felt so natural in my mouth. And then we finally met and it was like all of the humor and the heart and the tragedy of the script was suddenly in a person. There was a sense of ease in the way we were talking and openness and a joyfulness and an excitedness that was kind of instantaneous.”
Naomi Ackie, left, and Eva Victor in the movie “Sorry, Baby.”
(A24)
The film is the product of an unusual development process spurred by producers Barry Jenkins, Adele Romanski and Mark Ceryak. Based on their fandom of Victor’s online videos, Jenkins reached out through DMs and set up a meeting, setting in motion the process that would eventually lead to a screenplay for “Sorry, Baby.”
“When Ava sent the first draft of ‘Sorry, Baby,’ it arrived in the way that the most special things have for me, which is fully formed,” says Romanski. “Not to say that we didn’t then go back and continue to refine it, but it just arrived so clear and so emotional. It hit from the first draft. So it felt like it would be such a shame not to figure out how to put that into a visual form that other people could experience what we were able to experience just from reading it.”
From there, the team set about making Victor feel comfortable and confident as both a filmmaker and a performer. Having already had experience working with first-time feature directors such as Charlotte Wells on “Aftersun” and Raven Jackson on “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” the producing trio knew the process would require extra care and attention.
“Part of the reason this challenge felt possible is how much work we’ve done in how best to support a director in that debut space,” says Romanski. “There was a lot of confidence and assuredness around how to be that producer for that first-time filmmaker.”
The team arranged something of an unofficial directing fellowship, allowing Victor to shoot a few scenes from the script and then sit down with an editor to discuss how to improve on the footage. Victor made shot lists after watching Jenkins’ “Moonlight” and Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women,” leaning further into the mechanics of how to visually construct scenes. Victor also shadowed filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun during production for last year’s acclaimed “I Saw the TV Glow.”
“There was no prescriptive timeline to the course that it took,” explains Romanski. “It was just kind of, we’ll keep finding things to help you fortify and put on directorial muscle mass until you tell us, ‘I’m ready.’ And then when you say, ‘I’m ready,’ we’ll pivot to putting the movie together. There’s no blueprint for this, at least not for us. We haven’t done it quite like this before, but that’s also what’s exciting about it.”
Without ever sharing specifics, the story is rooted in Victor’s personal experience. Going back to some of their earliest press around 2018, Victor would self-describe as a sexual assault survivor. There was material about it in a stand-up comedy routine. (“It didn’t work,” Victor notes, dryly, adding that they longer do stand-up.)
The experience of making the movie and putting it out into the world has been one of potentially being continually retriggered, sent back to emotions and feelings Victor has worked hard to move forward from. Yet the process of making the film began to provide its own rewards.
“The thing about this kind of trauma is it is someone deciding where your body goes without your permission,” Victor says. “And that is surreal and absurd and very difficult. It’s very difficult to make sense of the world after something like that happens.”
The “Sorry, Baby” shoot in Massachusetts last year was a turning point, says Victor, one of validation. “The experience of directing myself as an actor is an experience of saying: This is where my body’s going right now,” says Victor. “And a crew of 60 people being like, ‘Yes.’ It’s this really special experience of being like, ‘I am saying where my body goes’ and everyone agrees. In the making of the film, that was very powerful to me.”
Eva Victor and John Carroll Lynch in the movie “Sorry, Baby.”
(A24)
Even with the success of “Sorry, Baby” and the way it has launched Victor to a new level of attention and acclaim, there is a tinge of melancholy to discovering just how many people are connecting to the film because it speaks to their own experiences.
“It’s a very personal film for a lot of people and there’s a sadness to that because it’s a community of people who have experienced things that they shouldn’t have had to,” says Victor. “It’s life-affirming for me to know that I wrote the film in a leap-of-faith way to be like: ‘Is anyone else feeling like this?’ And it’s nice to know that there are people who are understanding what that is.”
While recently back in France, Victor got another tattoo, this time on her foot, where she doesn’t see it as often.
“Maybe there’s a dash of mental illness in it,” says Victor. “But I think with tattoos, it’s such a good one, because it’s not going to hurt you but it is intense and permanent. So it is risk-taking.”
That attention to a small shift in personal perspective, a change in action and how one approaches the world, is part of what makes “Sorry, Baby” such a powerful experience. And as it now continues to make its way out to more audiences, Victor’s experience with it continues to evolve as well.
“There is a process that’s happening right now where it’s like an exhale. I’m like, whatever will be will be,” Victor says. “Putting something out into the world is a process of letting go of it. And I had my time with it and I got to make it what I wanted it to be. And now it will over time not be mine.”
The experience of making “Sorry, Baby” has pushed Victor forward both professionally and personally, finding catharsis in creativity and community.
“I guess that is the deal,” Victor offers. “That is part of the journey of releasing something. I mean it’s legitimately called a release.”
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