By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Katee Sackhoff is best known for the Battlestar Galactica reboot series in which she played an ace Viper pilot. The show always emphasized that her character was more at home in a cockpit than anywhere else because she was a gifted pilot whose personal and professional lives were always in perpetual chaos. The fact that Katee Sackhoff’s character was so at home as a pilot is morbidly ironic, though, because the actor herself absolutely hated her Viper scenes.
Katee Sackhoff And Her Viper
Looking back on her most famous scenes, Katee Sackhoff said very bluntly “I despise [the Viper cockpit scenes].” One of the reasons why she hated these scenes is because “it is very uncomfortable in that tight space.” This makes a lot of sense. Acting already involves performing in relatively small sets, and having to film extensively in a tiny cockpit makes a difficult job that much harder.
Seemingly getting into venting her frustrations, Katee Sackhoff continued her passionate rant about Viper scenes: “All of a sudden, you’re claustrophobic, you’re hot and sweaty, and then you’re cold, you have to pee, you need water, but you can’t drink it because you’ll have to pee again.” These are very understandable concerns, and we now have much more respect for what the actor endured to bring us her coolest scenes in the show.
Katee Sackhoff had been focusing on the purely mechanical concerns of filming the cockpit scenes, but she eventually turned her attention to something that most Battlestar Galactica fans adore: the Viper pilot uniform. According to the actor, “You have these rubber space suits and you get stuck to the seat…Gross!” Certainly, this is something that most cosplayers trying to recreate this iconic uniform don’t think about before getting ready to head to Comic-Con.
As it turns out, Katee Sackhoff also hated her Viper scenes because of temperature issues in the cockpit. “Then there’s wind in your face and you are falling asleep because it is so hot,” she said. Based on this description, these scenes were the worst of both worlds, with actors having to contend with either sleep-inducing heat or distracting wind, both of which interfere with the actor’s ability to do their job.
Speaking of the actor’s job, Katee Sackhoff touched on the fact that her Viper scenes, combined with the technical terms used by the writers, often made it difficult for her to prepare for scenes. “You are trying to memorize all this dialogue–50 pages–all this technical mumbo jumbo,” she said. There is a bit of irony here because showrunner Ronald Moore got his start writing for Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show where the actors famously complained about the “technobabble” dialogue they had to say in order to make these 24th-century plotlines plausible.
Ending her rant, Katee Sackhoff described her recurring thought while filming these Viper scenes: “Break my knee again, please.” This is in reference to her character getting injured after crashing her ship in the episode “You Can’t Go Home Again,” and she is on crutches for the rest of the season, something that Sackhoff declared as “the best thing that happened to me in Season 1.” She doesn’t fly again until the second season, and while this disappointed many fans, it sounds like the actor longed for the days when her character didn’t have to fly the not-so-friendly skies.
When we first heard that Katee Sackhoff hated filming her Viper scenes, it was something of a disappointment. After all, Starbuck was our favorite Battlestar Galactica character, and her pilot antics were particularly memorable. Hearing her rant about filming conditions, though, we can’t help but sympathize with everything she went through to bring our favorite scenes to life. And all of this is just more proof (not that we needed it) that Sackhoff is just as much of a tough and tenacious woman as her most famous character.
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