Battlestar Galactica star Katee Sackhoff is currently riding high in her new role as Bo-Katan Kryze on Disney+’s The Mandalorian. She recently appeared on Michael Rosenbaum’s Inside of You podcast, where she geeked out about the role and expressed how excited she is to be in the Star Wars universe now.
In the interview, Sackhoff also promised to be “optimistic” every single day on the set of Star Wars series — which banished Gina Carano over “abhorrent” tweets this week — and to be the person who helps set a positive tone. However, Sackhoff admitted in the podcast, she was not always that person. She said she used to be the person who needed to be called out on set for her bad attitude.
In fact, that very thing happened, she explained, on the set of the first season of Longmire. “When I’m in a bad mood, I have a hard time hiding it,’ she told Rosenbaum. On the first season of Longmire, she was in a funk after having come off of Riddick, where they were doing a lot of night shoots. “I was exhausted, and I was doing a lot of early morning days, and it was cold, and I got sick.”
“And [her Longmire co-star] Bailey Chase and I would drive to work together about 60 miles every morning. I would complain all the time because I felt I was being underutilized on the show and I was disappointed, and … I just wanted to bitch about it all the time.”
She said she was also in a bad place in her life, in a bad relationship, and was “not a very happy person.”
Her co-star apparently had heard enough of her daily complaining and snapped. “[Bailey Chase] called me out in front of the entire crew one day … He screamed at me and said, ‘Be here! I am so tired of you!’ It was loud, and I always said it was the wrong time and the wrong place and I was always very angry that he did it that way.”
The two have since made up, but “it was not good for a while,” she said. Yet, while she was disappointed in the way that he did it, “it needed to happen.” Again, she would have preferred that he had called her out off set and away from the crew, “but he taught me one of the biggest lessons of my career. And I realized that I had a choice. I had to change my perspective, and I need to grow the eff up.”
“It woke me up, and it made me realize that the attitude I bring to set every day is the attitude that permeates the set. For better or worse, because I am so big and so loud, I have the ability to change the set. I can make it a positive place to be or a negative place to be.”
“I was wrong. I was very wrong, and I had to learn that lesson.”
Sackhoff has since vowed to become the person that “people wanted to work with twice.”
Sackhoff said that she did a complete 180 and that by the end of the series, all the producers expressed to her that they would love to work with her again. Purposefully. “I taught myself how to be happy, how to enjoy what I am doing daily … and I took that into another life. I wanted to be that person who showed up every day, worked harder than everyone else, and was always positive and motivating.”
Hopefully, wanting to continue working with Sackhoff and her positive attitude will one day get Bo-Katan Kryze her own Star Wars spin-off, as well. She sure as hell deserves one.
