Katee Sackhoff Reveals Bo-Katan Was Her Toughest Role Yet

On August 24, 2025, actress Katee Sackhoff opened up about the personal and professional struggles she faced while portraying Bo-Katan Kryze in The Mandalorian. Although Sackhoff had long been associated with the character through her acclaimed voice performances in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Rebels, and Tales of the Empire, the transition to embodying Bo-Katan in live action proved far more difficult than she anticipated.

Speaking candidly on her podcast The Sackhoff Show with guest and former Battlestar Galactica co-star Tahmoh Penikett, Sackhoff revealed that playing the warrior princess in live action shook her confidence as an actress. She explained that her usual approach to acting—trusting instinct and grounding characters in her own personality—didn’t work with Bo-Katan, who felt distant from Sackhoff’s own identity and life experiences. While she could intellectually understand the character’s motivations, she admitted she struggled to truly feel them on a visceral, emotional level.

“I lost all of my confidence after Mandalorian, all of it,” Sackhoff confessed. She elaborated that most of her career had involved characters who were extensions of herself in some way, allowing her to act from an instinctive, authentic place. Bo-Katan, however, was a figure driven by ambition, trauma, and a warrior’s code that Sackhoff found difficult to internalize. As a result, she often felt disconnected, describing the process as one of the hardest challenges of her career.

The fallout from this experience lingered. Sackhoff revealed she chose not to audition for live-action roles for three years after her stint on The Mandalorian, believing her own performance in the audition process and in the series had fallen short. While she stopped short of saying she would never reprise the role, her comments suggested that embodying Bo-Katan in live action remains a daunting prospect.

Her remarks underscore the unique challenge of translating an animated character into live action, even for the performer most closely associated with the role. For Sackhoff, the experience was both creatively taxing and personally humbling, raising questions about whether she will return as Bo-Katan in future Star Wars projects.