Even though it seems that actors have truly charmed lives, all of the pomp and circumstance that surrounds the profession for those who are at (and at least near) the top of it can hide some real difficulties for those who decide it’s their life’s work. There’s a lot of competition for those jobs, and we’ve heard about things like people being cast as a series regular only to be fired and replaced after they’ve filmed a TV pilot. Well, now Battlestar Galactica vet Katee Sackhoff has talked about the time she saw someone get fired…while on their lunch break!
What Did Katee Sackhoff Say About The Longmire Lunch-Time Firing?
Fans will probably always associate Katee Sackhoff with her time as fighter pilot Captain Kara Thrace, a.k.a. Starbuck, on Syfy’s Battlestar Galactica for four seasons, but after her time fighting Cylons and being (potentially) resurrected in space (don’t get me started), she went on to star on the modern-day western drama, Longmire (which you can watch with your Netflix subscription).
During a recent chat on her podcast, The Sackhoff Show, with Patrick Sabongui, who stars as CIA agent Ryan Hassani on The Hunting Party (which recently wrapped Season 1 on the 2025 TV schedule) the actors got into a discussion about working with and as a guest star on television series. After Sabongui mentioned talent who come in but don’t bother to fully memorize even the scenes they’re in, rather concentrating only on their lines, Sackhoff noted:
I worked on Longmire. If the guest cast didn’t show up memorized and prepared, they were let go. Oh yeah. At the very least, not asked back. I watched them let someone go at lunch once, because what they got was unusable anyway.
WOW. Just think of that. You land a guest role on a popular show like Longmire (which ran for a total of six seasons after being picked up by Netflix for Season 4) and did your job so poorly that while you’re standing in line for your salad, you get pulled aside and told to pack up and go home. As her guest added, this meant that the producers optioned to take the extra time and spend the extra money to reshoot everything the guest actor had done.
Sabongui and Sackhoff talked about some of the difficulties of being an actor, with one being the fact that you can nab a guest part on a TV show and look like a success, but literally be out of work for weeks or months by the time that part has aired. Every gig has its unique ups and downs, but most of us do not have to constantly work really hard just to get another job so we can pay our bills.
That makes it pretty hard to believe that someone wouldn’t take their job seriously enough, and come to set unprepared. It sounds like this happened more than once, though, and as Sabongui noted, Longmire’s producers were serious about “quality control,” which is likely one of the reasons the end product was so good.