Back in 2017, a few years ahead of her getting to play Bo-Katan Kryze in The Mandalorian after having previously voiced the character in Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels, Katee Sackhoff kicked off her stint on The CW’s The Flash as Amunet Black, a metahuman crime boss. The Battlestar Galactica alum recurred across Season 4, and along with her unique ability to magnetically manipulate anything made of alnico alloy, the character was notable for her ridiculously exaggerated English accent. Well, Sackhoff has revealed she got some pushback over her accent while working on the DC TV show, which left her feeling “terrified.”
The actress reflected on her experience working on The Flash in an episode of the Blah Blah Blah with Katee Sackoff podcast while interviewing Danielle Panabaker, who appeared on the show for the entirety of its run playing Caitlin Snow, Frost and Khione. When Panabaker mentioned that Season 4 was “challenging” for everyone on The Flash because a showrunner she didn’t name was “let go” roughly halfway through the season (she was referring to Andrew Kreisberg, who was fired following a sexual harassment investigation), Sackhoff mentioned that this impacted too, saying:
Which is were I sort of I popped into, because I was a hire from him. He hired me, and I showed up at work having had all these discussions about what I was going to do with the character. And then [I] showed up with an accent, and the director literally looked at me like I was a crazy person ‘cause I wanted to do this accent that was prediscussed. This was what the character was going to be. And I remember that she really didn’t want me to do it, and I was terrified. I went to my trailer and I took a breath and I said, ‘I’m gonna do what I’m wanna do. I’m gonna do what I wanna do.’
Danielle Panabaker then noted how Katee Sackhoff’s experience was an example of how there was a “disconnect” between The Flash’s writers room and “everyone in LA,” i.e. the studio and the network, and what was actually getting communicated to them “on the ground in Vancouver.” She believes The Flash would have benefitted from having an executive producer acting like “a leader” who spearheaded setting a tone. This also would have allowed the cast and crew to avoid incidents like what Sackhoff went through, where there was clearly a breakdown in communication over what was expected from her.
Fortunately for Katee Sackhoff, there wasn’t any further pushback over her playing Amunet Black with an English accent, and when she asked Danielle Panabaker if that performance choice made her ask “What the fuck is she doing?”, Panabaker said no because a show like that lent itself to people coming in to play “ridiculous” characters. In her mind, The Flash benefitted from this and allowed the series regulars to be “really grounded.” Following Season 4, Sackhoff only reprised Amunet Black once, in the Season 6 episode “Love is a Battlefield,” and for some reason she was not asked back for the final season. However, the character was mentioned a handful of other times, usually in reference to her relationship with Damon Poitier’s Goldface.
If you’re now in the mood to revisit The Flash, its nine seasons can still be streamed with a Netflix subscription. As for Katee Sackhoff, you’ll need a Disney+ subscription to see what The Mandalorian Season 3 put Bo-Katan through, and it remains to be seen if she’ll appear in the recently-announced movie The Mandalorian & Grogu.
