While Katee Sackhoff was certainly a well-known actor prior to 2020 thanks to Battlestar Galactica, Longmire, Riddick, 24 and various other projects, her profile definitely got a major boost from The Mandalorian. Following her animated outings as Bo-Katan Kryze in Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels, Sackhoff brought her Star Wars character to life in live-action in the Disney+ subscription-exclusive show’s second season, then returned for Season 3. In the midst of that though, there was something that triggered Sackhoff to lose “all” of her confidence and doubt her acting abilities.
The actress talked about this dark time in her life while she was chatting with her Battlestar Galactica co-star Tahmoh Penikett on The Sackhoff Show, where the two of them also reflected on how they were wrong to reject Edward James Olmos’ advice when they were younger. Sackhoff informed Penikett that she “just now figured out a process almost 30 years” into her acting career and hired an acting coach. When he asked her to elaborate, she started off by saying:
… What had happened was I lost all of my confidence after Mandalorian… My style of acting has always just been your first instinct is the right instinct. Do that. Play the reality of the situation. And I've never really played a character. You know what I mean? I've always played two steps removed from myself, in a sense. Like, it always felt grounded in some part of my belly of who I was. Bo-Katan is nowhere near who I am as a human being. 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.
It’s one thing to voice a character across a handful of episodes of two animated TV shows (and later the anthology series Star Wars: Tales of the Empire), but playing Bo-Katan on camera marked a major turning point for Katee Sackhoff. More eyes were on her than ever, and while it may have looked on the outside like she was effectively playing the character, the experience was enough for her to start doubting herself because she wasn’t able to connect to Bo-Katan on a deeper level. Sackhoff continued:
It broke me. It just broke me where I started doubting everything about myself. I’m not a strong auditioner on tape and I was having to put myself on tape. I wasn't booking anything, and for three years, I basically didn't work… I broke down. I was crying one day with [Michael Trucco] at his kitchen counter. And he was like, ‘You're going to be fine. You always work.’ And I was like, ‘I’m not okay, man. I'm not working. I'm so broken. I've got no confidence left. I don't know what to do. I’m lost.’
Michael Trucco is another one of Katee Sackhoff’s Battlestar Galactica cohorts, and she and him have remained close since the show ended in 2009. That’s exemplified by how she was willing to be vulnerable in front of him about her acting struggles. She then told Tahmoh Penikett about how she was “scrambling” at this point because she “had no technique to fall back on,” which then led to a clash with her ex-manager:
And the worst thing was my old manager would say things like, ‘This is just easy for you. It's so easy for you. You don't even have to try. Just stop trying. You're trying too hard." And he would say, ‘You're just better at this. Just stop.’ And I I lost it at him one day and started screaming. I was like, ‘Stop saying that to me. You're destroying me because you've told me my entire life it's easy for me and it's not fucking easy. And now I'm at a point where I'm falling apart because it's not easy, and you're telling me it's easy. It's so dismissive.
From there, Katee Sackhoff hired a new manager, told him how she felt, and he set her up with an acting coach. That coach then told Sackhoff it wasn’t her goal to teach her out to act since she already knew how to do that, but just to get the Kara Thrace actress back in her “belly.” Evidently it worked, as Sackhoff sounds like she’s in a much more confident place. Otherwise, I doubt she would have discussed this subject while Tahmoh Penikett was appearing on her podcast.
That said, it’s unclear when we’ll see Katee Sackhoff reprise Bo-Katan Kryze again. Although The Mandalorian & Grogu comes out on May 22, 2026, but here’s been no mention of her being in the cast. Still, given both Sackhoff and Bo-Katan’s popularity, I have to think there’ll come a day when she returns to the Star Wars universe, even if it’s not necessarily tied to Din Djarin’s story.
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