The actress behind Bo-Katan said that she “didn’t understand” her character: “It just broke me. I started doubting everything about myself.”

Katee Sackhoff has spoken.

The Battlestar Galactica alum discussed the challenges of playing The Mandalorian‘s Bo-Katan Kryze, a character she struggled to understand, on her podcast The Sackhoff Show.

“I lost all of my confidence after Mandalorian. All of it,” Sackhoff recalled. “I’ve always played two steps removed from myself, in a sense. It 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 — 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 first played Bo-Katan, a militant Mandalorian fighting for control of her home planet, in the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars in 2012. She voiced Bo-Katan again in another animated series, Star Wars Rebels, in 2017 before making her live-action debut as the character in two episodes of The Mandalorian‘s second season in 2020. She played a more prominent role in season 3 of that series in 2023.

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The actress said that after season 3 of The Mandalorian wrapped in spring 2022, she struggled to regain her confidence and find more roles.

“It broke me. It just broke me,” Sackhoff said. “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.”

Besides The Mandalorian, Sackhoff’s only on-camera credit between 2022 and 2024 was a single episode of Law & Order. She also performed voiceover work for Robot Chicken, as well as animated Watchmen and Justice League movies. She played Bo-Katan once more in a 2024 episode of the animated series Star Wars: Tales of the Empire.

On the podcast, Sackhoff later explained that she hired a new manager after her post-Mandalorian struggles, and he connected the actress with an acting coach. “[The coach] said to me, ‘My goal is not to teach you how to act. You know how to act,’” she remembered. “‘I just need to get you back in your belly. You just need to find your confidence again.’ That’s it.”

Sackhoff is returning to the small screen in the upcoming limited series based on Stephen King’s Carrie. The series will reunite the actress with filmmaker Mike Flanagan, with whom she previously worked on the 2013 film Oculus.

“I trust Mike,” Sackhoff said of the project on her podcast. “I’ve relinquished control and I trust Mike, ’cause I’ve worked with him before and I know he’s amazing. I don’t know if I trust myself yet.”