According to The Hollywood Reporter, after voicing the animated version of Bo-Katan for years, Katee Sackhoff (Halloween: Resurrection, Oculus) said she struggled with the character on Disney+’s The Mandalorian. Sackoff has voiced the character for years but stated she really struggled when playing the live-action role on the series.
“I lost all of my confidence after Mandalorian — all of it,” Sackhoff said on her YouTube channel via The Hollywood Reporter. “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 via The Hollywood Reporter, “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.”
“You know what I would do differently?” she added later about the Mando role via The Hollywood Reporter. “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.
As per The Hollywood Reporter, she stated 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.
The full interview with Sackoff is down below.