To the surprise and delight of those who’ve been keeping up with the animated Star Wars universe, a character crossed over and made her live-action debut on The Mandalorian two weeks ago: Bo-Katan Kryze, a pivotal figure in both Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels. And the actress playing her, Battlestar Galactica’s Katee Sackhoff, was the same person who had supplied her voice for ten years. Good thing they look the same, minus the eye color…
One would think a job like this would be a breeze. That’s what Sackhoff thought until she stepped on set and had to fully act the part of Bo-Katan. As she told both /Film and Collider (yes, two separate interviews about the same subject), Katee found out voice acting as someone is different from portraying her on camera.
The problem: when she previously played Bo, she jumped and moved around to get the right inflection for each scene. Bo-Katan was not animated this way — her body movements are slow and stoic. Katee now had to replicate that. “I thought that I would just fold right into her because I played her for so long, and that wasn’t the case. I had to pause and actually go, ‘Oh my gosh, how does she move?’ And that took a beat…I’m a very expressive person, and that’s just not who Bo-Katan is. So I had to learn how to move like her, which was daunting, and I wasn’t prepared for that.”
Sackhoff’s Bo may be the first major Clone Wars character to make the jump to flesh and blood, but she won’t be the last. We don’t have to call the possibility of Ahsoka Tano a “rumor” anymore because her name was spoken clear as day at the end of “The Heiress.” Mando should be meeting her sometime this season, and she will definitely be played by Rosario Dawson no matter how she tries to hide it. Unlike Sackhoff, that’s a different actress than her VA — until now only Ashley Eckstein has played Ahsoka.
A new episode of The Mandalorian will premiere this Friday.
