Katee Sackhoff is opening up about the surprising toll her Star Wars role took on her mental health.
The actress, best known for her iconic turn as Kara “Starbuck” Thrace in Battlestar Galactica, first voiced the Mandalorian warrior Bo-Katan Kryze in Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Rebels before making her live-action debut as the character in season two of Disney+’s The Mandalorian. But while fans embraced her transition to live action, Katee Sackhoff now says the experience left her shaken and questioning her abilities.
“I lost all of my confidence after Mandalorian all of it,” Katee Sackhoff admitted in a candid video posted to her YouTube channel. “My style of acting has always just been: 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. Bo-Katan is nowhere near who I am as a human being.”
The actress, who played a central role in season three of the hit Disney+ series, explained that despite years of voicing Bo-Katan, embodying her physically on screen was a challenge she couldn’t fully connect with.
“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,” Katee Sackhoff said. “It broke me. It just broke me, where I started doubting everything about myself … for three years, I basically didn’t work. And it just destroyed my confidence. I broke down and was crying … I’m not OK, man. I’m so broken, I have no confidence left. I’m lost.”
Katee Sackhoff also revealed a tense fallout with her former manager during that period. According to her, he dismissed her concerns, insisting acting was “easy” for her. “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.’” She has since parted ways with him, found a new manager, and enlisted the help of an acting coach to rebuild her sense of security in her craft.
Katee Sackhoff said she wishes she had approached The Mandalorian differently: “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.” Still, she’s unsure whether she would truly want to change her performance.
Bo-Katan’s future in the franchise remains unclear. Lucasfilm’s next big Star Wars project, The Mandalorian & Grogu, is slated for theatrical release in May 2026, though Sackhoff has not been confirmed as part of the cast.
In the meantime, the actress is moving forward with a new challenge: she will star in a recurring role in Mike Flanagan’s upcoming eight-episode limited series adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie for Amazon Prime Video. Unlike her struggles with Bo-Katan, Sackhoff said she feels reassured by Flanagan’s approach. “I’m feeling better working with Carrie because I trust Mike … he’s amazing.”
For Katee Sackhoff, the experience with The Mandalorian may have been bruising, but she appears determined to rebuild her confidence one role at a time.