t's fair to say people are a little scared of Katee Sackhoff. After all, she currently inhabits two of the toughest customers on television: Battlestar Galactica's reckless pilot Kara "Starbuck" Thrace and Bionic Woman's ass-kicking villain Sarah Corvus. "People think I'm going to hit them," Sackhoff says, laughing. "And it's kind of not who I am in real life. I'm not assertive; I'm not decisive. I live vicariously through [these characters]. It's my form of therapy: I get to go to work and punch people, and it calms me down."
Sackhoff was initially considered too young and too sweet to play the angry, hard-drinking Starbuck. The actor had previously been cast as bubbly blondes and angsty teenagers, but she loved the role so much, she pursued it with a single-minded determination that Starbuck would surely admire. "To convince them to give me Starbuck, I really had to find the latent tomboy inside me and just go to town on it," she says. "I ended up acting like my brother in the audition; I kind of modeled the character after him."
Since she landed on Galactica, a gritty re-imagining of the classic 1970s sci-fi TV series, Sackhoff's fiercely charismatic performance has earned her critical accolades and fan adoration. Her work is so intense, so painfully honest, it's occasionally hard to watch. And yet you can't take your eyes off of her. Exploring the darker parts of the character's psyche is tough on the actor as well. "As much as your brain knows that it wasn't you going through this emotional roller coaster all day long, your body doesn't know," she says. A few years ago, that emotional ride exacerbated the actor's ulcer. "I was like, 'I swear I have no stress in my life, doctor; I don't know what's going on,' " she remembers. "We realized that it was probably the stress of playing Starbuck that was making my body react."
Sackhoff faced another challenge earlier this year, when Starbuck was apparently killed in a particularly controversial episode. The character made a surprise return in the season finale, but Sackhoff's name disappeared from the opening credits for several weeks, and rumors swirled that she had been written off the show. Producers asked the actor to keep Starbuck's eventual resurrection under wraps; even the Galactica cast and crew and Sackhoff's father were in the dark. "It was really hard to keep that a secret," she recalls. "[Executive producer] David Eick called me, and he's like, 'I just got a phone call from the network saying that you were crying on set.' I said, 'I was not crying on set; listen, you told me to sell it. I'm an actor. What do you want me to do?' " Ultimately, Eick relented, and the rest of the cast was let in on Starbuck's fate.
Growing up in Oregon, Sackhoff loved sports—competitive swimming, in particular. A knee injury sidelined her dreams, so she decided to explore her underlying desire to become a performer. "I used to go and memorize scenes from movies and go stare in the mirror and see if I could do the exact same facial expressions that, like, De Niro did in Taxi Driver," she says, chuckling.
One of her first breaks came in the form of a major role in the 1998 Lifetime movie Fifteen and Pregnant, which starred Kirsten Dunst and was filmed in Oregon. "I got myself an agent without telling my parents, so I could get ahold of the audition material," she remembers. "Went home, memorized it, went down, got the part, and then had to convince my mom to drive from work to sign the contract, because I was too young to sign. I didn't realize how important that role would be to me. It Taft-Hartleyed me into the union, so I got my SAG card."
Shortly after graduating from high school, Sackhoff moved to Los Angeles and, thanks to Fifteen and Pregnant director Sam Pillsbury, connected with a manager, who introduced her to agent Leland LeBarre, her current rep. Sackhoff started landing guest turns on series such as ER; she had just wrapped up a series-regular stint on The Education of Max Bickford when the Galactica script came her way.
A Galactica made-for-TV movie, Razor, airs Nov. 24, and the series will return next year for its fourth and final season. In the meantime, Sackhoff has kept busy by administering regular beat-downs to NBC's titular Bionic Woman as smirking, glowering baddie Sarah Corvus. Eick, who also executive-produces Bionic Woman, was the one who thought of Sackhoff for the part. The actor says, "I read the script and I immediately loved Sarah Corvus."
And though she no longer has any problems getting casting directors to see her as the tough gal, she's now facing a challenge of a different sort: convincing people that she can do, say, a light comedy. A recent starring role in the Lifetime TV movie How I Married My High School Crush gave her the opportunity to show another side of her talent. "[The people at Lifetime] were the only ones to be like, 'We could see Katee Sackhoff in a romantic comedy,' " she says with a laugh. "It was really fun to actually have makeup on and be cute for a day or two."
