doesn’t just play her roles. She sinks into them and makes them a part of her own being. Whether she’s wielding a lightsaber in ‘Ahsoka’ or stepping into the unsettling uncanny valley as Amelia in ‘M3GAN 2.0’, the Ukrainian actor brings an intentionality that makes even the most artificial characters come alive with emotional truth.

Trained in Kyiv, Ukraine and later in Los Angeles, Sakhno first caught international attention with roles in ‘Pacific Rim: Uprising’ and ‘The Spy Who Dumped Me’. She earned critical acclaim for her portrayal of the enigmatic Shin Hati in ‘Ahsoka’ on Disney+. Her latest role, a hyper-intelligent spy robot, pits her against the iconic killer doll, M3GAN, in a sequel that ups the camp, chaos, and cultural commentary on AI ethics.

Sakhno is deeply connected to her heritage, art, and craft. With Schön!, she reflects on the nuances of playing a next-gen robot, the choreography of stillness, and the creative collaborations that help her tell stories that move viewers beyond the screen.

I think what drew me to the role is when I first read the script, I resonated with parts of her. There was a lot in the original script that didn’t make it to the final version. I just think there’s a lot to learn from what ‘M3GAN’ is trying to tell as a film. There’s more chaos and more questions in this one. It’s more camp, but it also has even more depth. I think Amelia, I saw in her what a lot of people experience. It’s about coming to an understanding of what your beginning is and the specific hardships that led you to become who you are, and how to deal with them. It’s also about beginning to understand your autonomy, your being, and your wiring.

I think Amelia is sort of like a cautionary tale. She’s what happens when you build something powerful without fully considering the ripple effects. She was made to defend, but the way she defines threat becomes dangerously skewed. That’s not far from the systems we’re creating today, where we don’t fully understand and might not be able to rein in once they’re autonomous. It’s not the tech itself that’s terrifying. It’s kind of our minds and our creation, if that makes sense. I just think the first ‘M3GAN’ was a really, really good film. Like it was fun when it needed to be, it was scary where it needed to be. I was excited to work with Gerard (Johnstone) and Allison (Williams), and the whole team.

I worked with the movement coach, Luke (Hawker), who also worked on the first ‘M3GAN’ film with Amie (Donald), and he’s just a fascinating person to me. We spent a bit of time before filming just developing Amelia’s physical vocabulary. She’s not rigidly robotic, but she is also not quite human. There’s this sense that everything she does is stripped of waste, like hyper-efficiency, and stillness has become a tool too. She couldn’t pause so completely. It needed to be a little bit unnerving.

As she starts deviating from her original programming, those shifts and movements become a way to track her internal changes. Well, I hope it at least comes off that way. It was sometimes exhausting doing so, and some of the costumes we had were limiting, but I just really enjoyed playing around with it. Interestingly enough, Luke is very connected to the human body in a way that made me learn a lot about the chi and how to ground the energy within yourself and become still enough, like holding your breath in the right way. It was one of my favourite parts of working on Amelia.

I think you can dig into someone’s depth as much as you feel called to. She immediately had lots of it. It was right on the page for me. I think her psychological journey was quite clear to me. It was almost like coming of age for a robot. There was a lot of choreography as well. Bridging the psychological and physical aspects of it all together in order for it to serve the story in the way that it needs to be served. I can go as depth full as an actor as I want to, but I’m still in service of something that Gerard is creating. I’m there doing the job. But there were lots of stunts, lots of training, and learning different techniques. I feel very lucky that I get to work with some of the best stunt coordinators and stunt teams in the world, and getting to learn how to use my body in that way is a gift.

Amelia means so much to me. I learned so much from her. I healed parts of myself through her as well. But this is the aspect of the job that is deeply personal. The eye movement delay was fun to do. Her neck moved before her eyes did, and I was holding my breath in my throat because I couldn’t breathe in the moments we were filming. I would have to hold my breath so that we were moving around oxygen in my body, to remain still, and that was fun. I was so grateful to have Luke and Jed (Brophy) because we would do a take and then sort of ponder, what can we add? She needs to blend into society, but still be just a little bit off when you look at her.

I was just excited to join the family. I have great respect for Blumhouse and what they create, their ethos, and how they work. The team itself was really brilliant, like Toby (Oliver), our cinematographer. He shot ‘Get Out’. I’m a huge fan of his work. Allison is a wonderful, wonderful actor, and she blew me away with the way she was able to lead the film and also be really, really present as a producer on set for everybody involved.

I was just really excited to have the experience of working with those people. This film is bananas in the best way. It’s not pretentious. It doesn’t try to be slick, it doesn’t try to hide from its craziness. It celebrates being an entertaining film with a sprinkle of philosophy behind it that hopefully makes people have a good time, but leave the theatre pondering a few things about where we’re going as humanity.

It’s so potent and can feel unsettling, and I think it is. As AI becomes more integrated, I hope we can handle it with humility and curiosity, too, but always grounded in responsibility. AI isn’t some alien thing. We made it. It’s mirroring our patterns, for better or for worse. If we want to build technology that genuinely helps humanity, we have to start by being honest about who we are and what we’re feeding into these systems. The answer isn’t fear. It’s conscious engagement, like staying awake to what we’re creating and asking what kind of future we’re shaping with it.

We didn’t have to build the dynamic, because it was just there from the very start. I am a new character coming into the film, and they had all built a family when they were making the first movie. I was just lucky enough to be welcomed into it, in the way that I have by Alison, but also Jen (Van Epps), and everyone. I had a wonderful PA named Poppy, and she was the first person I met on the ground in New Zealand. She took me in and informed me on what it’s like living in New Zealand, the beauty of the land and made me fall in love with the culture.

It was just deeply, deeply special and the dynamic on screen, you know, we just had fun. We just really enjoyed making it. Even though my character is quite detached from the rest of them, it was fun to play around. On our days off, we spent time together and explored New Zealand. I was really lucky to become part of the family.

With respect to Dave Filoni and the Star Wars family, I can share absolutely nothing, but it’s been a true joy. I missed Shin deeply, and I missed being on set with everybody. They feel like my soul family, and I don’t say it lightly. I’m so excited for season two, and I’m very proud of what Dave has created, and all the directors coming on board. It’s been truly wonderful filming it, and I can’t wait for the fans to see it.

Truthfully speaking, deeply collaborative. I think it’s the most collaborative environment that I’ve ever been in. You don’t naturally expect it when becoming part of something that can feel so vast, and a world that is so beloved, but Dave and Jon (Favreau), it speaks a lot about their humanity. They equally involved everybody in the creative process, and made sure that you bring the best parts of yourself into it. So starting from obviously working on the character, to the visual aspects of her, even in the first season, we had a play with it, and did it with respect toward the world itself, the characters, and the fans. I never expected this level of collaboration, truly.

I seek humanity in every role I get to be a part of. I also believe that the stories that you get to be a part of have always been meant for you. You can’t necessarily force anything. I’m just hoping to continue finding true storytellers to work with. I look forward to, hopefully, playing a real person at some point. I am definitely interested in doing a romantic comedy. That is something that is interesting to me, but I just keep my heart and my eyes open for what’s incoming. There’s some stuff that I have ahead that I’m supposed to film soon, some I’m excited for. Can’t necessarily speak on it just yet. I’m just open to it, and I’m just hoping to continue doing what I love and being of benefit to the stories that I tell.

Being Ukrainian is an integral part of who I am and how I lead my life, and the stories that I tell. I hope I can be taken wholly as an actor without borders in the work that I do and in my personal life, be an activist. That will always be part of my life, and I hope the spaces that I get to inhabit can only bring more awareness to the history of my people and my country and to the ongoing war that is happening. I hope I can help in any way I can, and I think every Ukrainian is doing it in their own way.

I hope there will always be a rising appetite for it. I hope that people just continue to be storytellers and want to find deep and honest stories from all around the world. I also think that each one of us, as storytellers, fights some sort of stereotype or war within ourselves, and it’s important to see it. It’s important to let it be witnessed, if it makes sense. I hope there are fewer stereotypical roles of Ukrainians and Eastern Europeans. There’s so much depth to our history that goes hundreds of years back, and be it in folklore or mysticism or even the ongoing struggles many people are going through. No matter where you’re from, you can find yourself in these stories.

That’s such a difficult question. I can’t necessarily imagine myself doing anything else, because storytelling, in many ways, has been and is my lifeline. But I grew up studying painting and sculpting. I went to a children’s arts academy for nine years before I left my family in Ukraine. I think the closest thing, the most honest thing to me, would be being a painter. I still paint during my free time, and it’s like a personal relationship I have with storytelling, and something that teaches me a lot about the present moment. Maybe something with nature and animals as well. There are parts of me that are quite political as well. I could have gone into maybe politics, but it’s a very, very complicated world to be a part of, not one that is necessarily always honest and one that is filled with a lot of corruption.

I’ll be honest. I think so much of my life that I lead now is in support of her. I don’t necessarily think that time exists linearly, and I find myself kind of coming back to when I was eight or nine in my childhood bedroom, dreaming of being an actor. I come back to that time and sort of just hug her and thank her, because she is the one who led me to do this, and she’s the one who was honestly fearless enough to believe in her own when she was 13.

You know, those things move me quite a bit, and I’m here because of her. She’s in some ways stronger than I am and more fearless than I am. I just would tell her to trust the process and trust your gut. That is everything. I think part of the lesson here in this lifetime is continuing to learn how to be honest with yourself and move through life truthfully aligned with your being. So I kind of have nothing to teach her. She just continues to teach me.

‘M3GAN 2.0’ is out now.

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