Katee Sackhoff Says ‘The Mandalorian’ Ruined Her Confidence: “It Broke Me”

More like Boo-Katan.

Disney+’s The Mandalorian famously got pretty uneven as the series progressed (Grogu is being away to sent to train with Luke Skywalker. Wait-wait, no, he’s not).

But one character in the Star Wars drama apparently took a real psychological toll on former Battlestar Galactica star Katee Sackhoff, who first appeared late in the show’s second season as the Mandalorian warrior named Bo-Katan Kryze and then was given a far larger role in season three.

Sackhoff had actually been voicing the character for years on Star Wars animated series (such as The Clone Wars and Rebels). But she says she really struggled with playing the live-action version of her character.

“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.

The next Mandalorian project is the upcoming film The Mandalorian & Grogu coming out next May and it’s unclear if Sackhoff’s character is in the film.

Sackhoff will next be seen in a recurring role in the latest adaptation of Stephen King’s horror classic Carrie — this time from frequent King adapter Mike Flanagan, who is making Carrie into an eight-episode Amazon Prime limited series. Sackhoff added during the video that she’s feeling better working Carrie “because I trust Mike … he’s amazing.”