The original Battlestar Galactica TV show was a response to the success of blockbuster movie Star Wars. People best know actor Katee Sackhoff as Starbuck from the early-2000s SyFy series, but now she’s Bo Katan on The Mandalorian, the first Star Wars TV show. An ouroboros of pop culture, that Bo Katan’s co-creator Dave Filoni didn’t really have a choice but to make happen.
In Anaheim, Star Wars creators and fans met up for Celebration 2022 for the first time in years. At a panel promoting Season 3 of The Mandalorian, including a teaser trailer not released officially but shaky copies exist on Twitter and TikTok. Later, Sackhoff sat down for an interview on the Star Wars Celebration Live streaming stage. Naturally, she was asked about how it felt to bring a voice-acting only role to life. That’s when the Another Life actor revealed that Star Wars Celebration itself had something to do with her getting cast. At least, in her mind it does.
“I remember Celebration 2018 in Chicago, I cornered…Dave Filoni, and I said, ‘So I hear about this show Mandalorian, and my character is not dead. So, um, how good of friends are we?’ He said it was already in the works, but I like to think that I had some sway…. However, I didn’t believe anything was actually going to happen."
Ten years ago, Sackhoff was cast to provide the voice for Bo Katan. She was the right hand of a militant fanatic Mandalorian named Pre Vizla, voiced by none other than Jon Favreau. The Iron Man director was working at Skywalker Ranch, met Dave Filoni and also finagled a voice role in The Clone Wars for himself. When the two rejoined in the late 2010s to create The Mandalorian for Disney+, it was another kind of full circle moment.
Sackhoff also worked with Filoni for a long time, reprising the role of Bo Katan many times in Star Wars: Rebels and The Clone Wars, including the final season that debuted in 2020. So, it does ring true that he and Favreau would already have planned to bring in Bo Katan, the last surviving connection to the Mandalorian characters in The Clone Wars. Her sister Satine was both the queen of that society and a devout pacifist. In Star Wars: Rebels, the character Sabine Wren gave the vaunted Darksaber to her in order to lead Mandalore. Sackhoff was right that there was plenty of unfinished business there.
Still, if the folks at Lucasfilm had any questions about casting for the role, Katee Sackhoff cornering Dave Filoni at Star Wars Celebration to ask about playing Bo Katan didn’t hurt her chances. In a way, Bo Katan always favored Sackhoff, in the way that such stylized animation can resemble real-world people.
It’s even harder for the aliens to make the transition, just look at how upset fans are over the redesign of the Grand Inquisitor in Obi-Wan Kenobi. But from both her voice work and her blockbuster run as Starbuck, fans knew that Sackhoff was the choice to play Bo Katan.
Still, the actor herself couldn’t really believe it was happening, even after it was officially decided. She also spoke about her first wardrobe and make-up test. She donned the armor, styled her hair in a Bo Katan way, and she became this character. “Some tears might have been shed” between her and Filoni, she said. Yet, Sackhoff realized at that moment that she had no idea how to physically play Bo Katan. Obviously, she nailed it.
For almost two decades, Katee Sackhoff has brought tough, militant sci-fi women characters to life starting with Starbuck and peaking with Star Wars. Like Mark Hamill and Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa and Carrie Fisher, Bo Katan is now inseparable from Katee Sackhoff.
See Katee Sackhoff suit up as Bo Katan again in The Mandalorian when it debuts new episodes February 2023 on Disney+.
