Katee Sackhoff compares working on The Mandalorian to Battlestar Galactica

Katee Sackhoff played Bo-Katan Kryze on the second and third seasons of The Mandalorian, Disney+’s flagship Star Wars show about Mandalorian bounty hunter Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his adorable little pal Grogu. While previous seasons focused pretty exclusively on Din and Grogu, this time around Sackhoff’s character stepped into the foreground as the new prospective leader of the Mandalorians. That was hugely exciting for longtime fans who’ve loved the actor since her days playing the roguish pilot Starbuck on Syfy Channel’s Battlestar Galactica reboot from the early 2000s.

Sackhoff has just started a new podcast called Blah Blah Blah with Katee Sackhoff, where she instigates casual conversations with various creatives to give listeners an inside view into the process of making their favorite shows, movies and more. The second episode of the podcast features The Mandalorian director Bryce Dallas Howard as a guest, which led to some interesting commentary from Sackhoff about how different it was to work on a show with a tremendous budget like The Mandalorian compared to her time on Battlestar.

“I’ve never worked on something with a budget this big,” Sackhoff said. “Our catering budget is probably the entire budget of Battlestar Galactica. Granted, that was 20 years ago.”

Katee Sackhoff: Working on The Mandalorian was “the opposite of what I’m used to.”

Sackhoff explained one of the biggest difference this enormous budget made for The Mandalorian: it allows the show to do far more takes. Back when Sackhoff was working on Battlestar Galactica, time and resources were much more limited.

"Most episodes of television that I am used to shoot in eight days. It is so fast and you [only] get two to three takes — and that’s it. They used to joke and call me the ‘One Take Wonder,’ because I would know exactly what I was gonna do. I would have it all planned, I would know the story. And yes, I would fly by the seat of my pants inside that box, but I knew I had one or two takes to get it perfect and that was it. From every angle, mind you."

Sackhoff praised Dallas Howard, who directed Episode 6 of season 3, “Guns for Hire,” aka the one with Jack Black and Lizzo. Dallas Howard has been directing on The Mandalorian since the start, and according to Sackhoff has a method that allowed her to really tap into different parts of her character.

"God, love you. The amount of takes you do is like my bread and butter. I think that we got to Take 3 and I was convinced that was it, because that’s my experience. We [once] did 38 takes of one scene. That is legitimately the opposite of what I’m used to … I absolutely love it because it gives the ability to find different things inside what I thought. And then sometimes, you get so over it, that you give a different performance. You’re like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t expect that!’ That wouldn’t have come without me completely abandoning everything that I had already done or thought I knew."

Blah Blah Blah with Katee Sackhoff is available now in all the major podcast places. The Mandalorian season 3 is streaming on Disney+. We’ll most certainly see Sackhoff return for the fourth season, whenever the WGA writers’ strike resolves so that the galaxy’s fiercest bounty hunters can get back to work. No scabbing on Mandalore.

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