Katee Sackhoff has been a staple of genre TV for more than two decades at this point, from pretty much the minute she stepped into the role of Kara “Starbuck” Thrace in the 2003 miniseries that eventually grew into the highly influential Battlestar Galactica reboot. Running, after the Syfy series eventually ended, through shows like 24 and most especially modern-day Western Longmire, Sackhoff has demonstrated an incredible, and incredibly consistent, knack for playing admirable-but-highly-fucked-up people, often operating at the edges of acceptable behavior. But it was, somehow, a space terrorist named after Dave Filoni’s cat that apparently “broke” her as a performer.
Sackhoff was talking about her life and career on her YouTube series The Sackhoff Show last week when she revealed, somewhat surprisingly, that the experience of playing armored freedom fighter Bo-Katan Kryze on Disney+’s The Mandalorian completely shattered her confidence in herself. (The clip starts at about the 35:30 mark in the above link.) She was having the chat with her old BSG co-star Tahmoh Penikett, who serves as a nice audience stand-in here, in so far as he also seems completely flummoxed at the idea that the performer who explored every ugly, fascinating crevice of Kara Thrace’s vision-haunted brain might bounce off of Jon Favreau’s goofy Star Wars show. But that was maybe part of the problem: Sackhoff notes that she’s never really played a “character” in her various projects, stating, “I’ve always played two steps removed from myself, in a sense.” When confronted with Bo-Katan, who took on an increasingly prominent role in the Disney show’s third season, Sackhoff says, “Her life, what she wants, I didn’t understand her. As much as I understood her, I never felt her in my stomach. I never identified with her. I didn’t know how to find her.”
(As folks like IGN have noted, this is mildly wild in so far as Sackhoff had actually been playing the character for more than a decade at that point, albeit as a voice role; she originated the character in 2012, in an episode of Star Wars cartoon The Clone Wars. Still, we do get that there’s a difference between being in the voice booth and actually portraying the character’s whole physicality for several episodes at a time.)
Sackhoff says that her inability to fully find the character “Broke me, where I started doubting everything about myself… for three years, I basically didn’t work. And it just destroyed my confidence.” (Indeed, a quick perusal of her IMDB shows that she’s largely been relegated to voice roles ever since.) Sackhoff notes in the interview—even as a slightly shocked Penikett tries to remind her that she’s Katee Sackhoff—that she’s been working with an acting coach to help her find a process for when her innate grasp of a character fails her. But even so, it’s fascinating (and slightly scary) to hear that the Star Wars machine could defeat a performer so well-known for brave, bold performances.
