Katee Sackhoff has a unique place in the Star Wars universe as she’s one of few actors to portray the same Star Wars character in both live-action and animation. Mandalorian Bo-Katan was first introduced in Dave Filoni’s The Clone Wars before appearing in The Mandalorian, meaning Sackhoff has spent years with the role. It’s for this reason that the writer and director of The Mandalorian Season 3 apparently deferred to her when it came to how the character should be portrayed.
While actors can certainly give some amount of input regarding how to handle a character or a scene, the job of the actor is usually to simply give the performance asked of them. It’s the writer or the director who decides what the character should be doing. However, Katee Sackhoff tells Empire that on the set of The Mandalorian Season 3 she had a “crazy experience” because producer Jon Favreau and director Rick Famuyiwa would routinely ask her how she felt because they understood that she knew the character better than they did. Sackhoff explained…
I’ve lived in this woman’s skin for a long time now. One of the things that Jon and I focus on is where she is in the moment, what peppers her experience. Jon and Rick, every single day, defer to me, which is a crazy experience, to have these masters asking me what I feel. It respects the craft, and the years that I have put in. I really do know her – her pain is my pain. When she experiences something, I really feel it.
While the experience of having a producer and director defer to her may have been crazy, it was clearly something that Katee Sackhoff appreciated. She not only understands this character well but also apparently feels very close to the character. By having some amount of power in how she is portrayed that closeness is only going to grow, and likely lead to a better performance overall.
Bo-Katan first appeared in a Season 4 episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars so Katee Sackhoff has been playing the role in one form or another for over a decade now, having appeared there and in Star Wars: Rebels before making the transition to live-action in Season 2 of The Mandalorian.
Exactly what we’ll see from Bo Katan in the upcoming season of The Mandalorian remains to be seen. She and Din Djarden aren't necessarily working toward the same goals. We know Bo-Katan is trying to unite Mandalore, but the symbol of that unification, the Darksaber, belongs to The Mandalorian. He may have other goals since his focus is on his particular offshoot of Mandlorians, which Bo-Katan sees as a cult. We’ll find out and be able to watch The Mandalorian Season 3 when it hits Disney+ on March 1.
