Katee Sackhoff might be a warrior in Mandalorian armor, but behind the helmet, she was falling apart. The 45-year-old actress, best known to sci-fi fans as Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica and more recently as Bo-Katan Kryze in The Mandalorian, admitted that the role nearly broke her. Not in the dramatic Hollywood “I quit” sense, but in the very real, “I didn’t work for three years and lost all my confidence” sense.
On her podcast, The Sackhoff Show, she told co-star Tahmoh Penikett, “I lost all of my confidence after Mandalorian, all of it. I’ve always played two steps removed from myself. Bo-Katan is nowhere near who I am as a human being. Her life, what she wants — I didn’t understand her. I never identified with her. I didn’t know how to find her.”
That disconnect hit her hard. Sackhoff has voiced Bo-Katan since Star Wars: The Clone Wars in 2012, but stepping into live-action alongside Pedro Pascal in The Mandalorian Season 2 and later Season 3 was a different beast. “It broke me. It just broke me,” she admitted. “I started doubting everything about myself. I’m not a strong auditioner on tape, and I wasn’t booking anything. For three years, I basically didn’t work, and it just destroyed my confidence.”
Her instinct-driven approach—“your first instinct is the right instinct, play the reality of the situation”—didn’t quite gel with a character who felt so far removed from her. Add in her clashes with her then-manager, who apparently thought acting came “easy” for her, and Sackhoff hit a wall. “You’ve told me my entire life this is easy for me and it’s not f—ing easy and now I’m falling apart,” she recalled shouting. Eventually, she walked away, hired a new manager, and brought on an acting coach. “My goal is not to teach you how to act. You know how to act,” the coach told her. “You just need to find your confidence again.”
Things slowly turned around. She booked Law & Order in 2024, returned to voice work in Star Wars: Tales of the Empire, and is now part of Mike Flanagan’s upcoming Prime Video adaptation of Carrie. Sackhoff said, “I trust Mike. I’ve worked with him before and I know he’s amazing. I don’t know if I trust myself yet.”
But maybe the most eye-opening moment of her Mandalorian run came thanks to the late Carl Weathers. During Season 3’s episode “The Pirate,” Sackhoff finally shared a scene with Weathers’ Greef Karga. Behind the camera, though, she got hit with some blunt advice. “Do you remember that day on set when Carl told me that I was boring?” she laughed to stunt double Brendan Wayne on her podcast. “What you’re doing is boring.”
Before you cringe, it wasn’t an insult. It was mentorship. Weathers wanted more physicality, more life in the performance. “Am I boring?” Sackhoff asked Jon Favreau in a panic right after. His answer: “You’re fine.” But as Wayne added, Weathers was pushing everyone to “evolve.”
Sackhoff took it in stride. She’s not sure if Bo-Katan will show up in The Mandalorian & Grogu movie hitting theaters in May 2026, but she’s already stepped back into her groove. Call it confidence 2.0. Carl Weathers approved.
