The first season of The Mandalorian was somewhat of a godsend for Disney. It aired at the same time that the disastrously terrible The Rise of Skywalker was released in theaters. It was a beacon of hope for the franchise during a time when a certain subgenre of fans had taken charge and were ruining the experience for everyone else. Din Djarin hadn’t appeared in previous SW properties, but the show opened up a whole new world of storylines transferring over from animation to live-action. Social media basically manifested Rosario Dawson’s casting as Ahsoka Tano into being. That casting came with its own little side drama from fans who were upset that Ashley Eckstein, who voiced the character, wasn’t cast.
After all of that, everyone was pretty much universally excited to learn that Katee Sackhoff would be reprising her voice role as live-action Bo-Katan. Bo’s a badass. Katee’s a bad ass. The man-babies who like to cry about Star Wars casting were happy. It felt like a win-win all around. However, when it came from transitioning from voice to screen, Katee struggled. On her weekly YouTube show, “The Sackhoff Show,” she spoke about how difficult the process was for her. She even lost her confidence, which led to her not working for years and replacing her manager of almost three decades.
“I lost all of my confidence after Mandalorian — all of it,” Sackhoff said on her YouTube channel (below). “My style of acting has always just been [that] your first instinct is the right instinct. Do that. Play the reality of the situation. And I’ve never really played a character. I’ve always played two steps removed from myself, in a sense. [My characters] 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 — like, 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.
Sackhoff continued: “Very Scary. 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. And it just destroyed my confidence. I broke down and was like crying … I’m not OK, man, I’m so broken, I have no confidence left. I’m lost.”
She said she clashed with her former manager over the issue, after the manager told her, “‘This is easy for you. You don’t have to try. Stop trying so hard.’ And I lost it at him one day and started screaming: ‘You’ve told me my entire life this is easy for me and it’s not fucking easy and now I’m falling apart.’” Sackhoff said she got a new manager and enlisted the help of an acting coach to help her find confidence.
“You know what I would do differently?” she added later about the Mando role. “I think I was so scared that I was going to fuck up that as soon as I delivered the take I wanted to deliver, that’s what I gave them. Up until that point in my career, I’d give four different takes and think they’d find it in post. I would change it and do something different every time and had fun with it. I tried so desperately to be so controlled.” That said, she doesn’t know if she would have changed her performance.
Whew, those are some pretty intense feelings, and I appreciate Katee sharing them and her experience. I’m so sorry that she felt this way. It really wasn’t her fault, though! The third season of The Mandalorian was not great, and the writing really let her down. I wish that she wouldn’t be so hard on herself because her performance was fine. Personally, and from what I saw online, fans really liked seeing her bring the role to real life. Katee was a bright spot in an otherwise meh season of a television show with a lot of fans and a lot of potential. At one point, I actually thought that she was being set up with her own series. I say this with my whole chest: Moving forward, I hope we get more of Katee’s Bo-Katan.
Photos credit: Roger Wong/INSTARimages, mpi099/MediaPunch/INSTARimages
