RALPH MACCHIO CAN'T BELIEVE HE'S HERE.
Why would he? It doesn’t make sense. Thanks to his lead role as Daniel Larusso in 1984’s The Karate Kid, he was one of the biggest stars in the world at 22, and for a handful of years stayed that way before the industry crane-kicked him in the face. Yet after a spell on the sidelines he’s now co-headlining one of the most popular TV shows in the world: Cobra Kai, which has brought Larusso back to the masses. After all of Macchio’s “ups and downs”, he never anticipated this. “Here I am now and it’s just crazy,” he says. “Crazy!”
Cobra Kai is almost impossibly successful, resonating with multiple generations. Almost 129 million people have watched the debut episode on Youtube, where it began life before becoming a runaway hit on Netflix. It’s violent but sweet; nostalgic yet fresh. “The creators of this show have this secret sauce,” says Macchio, an exec producer on it alongside William Zabka, who played, and still plays, Larusso’s karate rival Johnny Lawrence. “They take extra care, we all do, to find that balance — that might not be the last time I use that word,” he says, half-sheepish, half-self-aware, all cheeseball, unafraid to pepper his musings with the franchise’s lexicon. He has, after all, been talking about The Karate Kid for almost 40 years, inextricably linked to a character he’s had an on/off relationship with but has now fully embraced.
And there’s no end in sight. He’s talking from his home from home in Atlanta, where he’s filming Cobra Kai Season 5. “It’s really awesome to get a Season 5 before Season 4 even hits,” he smiles, as he does for most of the hour we spend together. He’s the cat that got the cream. In the nicest way. It’s been a long time coming.
Macchio was 21 when he read the screenplay for The Karate Kid, and had misgivings. It was, he thought, “cheesy, or at the time I would have said saccharine. Some of the scenes felt stereotypical. And I disliked the title. It didn’t sound like a major motion picture. The Karate Kid.”
He’ll tell you himself he was a little cocky, armed with a New York attitude care of his Long Island upbringing, which had already served him well for his breakout role in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders (1983). He liked acting as a kid, and as he grew up became obsessed with John G. Avildsen’s Rocky and everything Robert De Niro was putting out, watching Raging Bull countless times. Meanwhile, when he was 12 he read S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders, and related to its character Johnny Cade, the downtrodden kid who goes on the run after killing a gang member who was trying to drown his friend. Macchio wasn’t downtrodden and he wasn’t a killer, but he did identify with Johnny. “He was physically described like I looked — dark hair, big brown eyes, one of the smallest of the group,” he remembers. “I was this skinny, lanky kid. I could play all the sports but I was never picked first, that’s for sure. I empathised and sympathised with him.” A few years later, when he heard that Coppola was adapting the book, he went for it, dead set on playing Johnny, and got it. He’d had a role in television comedy-drama Eight Is Enough, but The Outsiders was the big one — it was Macchio who, as Johnny, got to whimper the immortal words, “Stay gold, Ponyboy,” as he lay dying, still breaking hearts today.
Macchio played the role like a rabbit in the headlights:
damaged, scared. He credits Coppola with shaping him into a more honest actor, and the film set up his career. “That’s when I thought, ‘This could be for life,’” he says. “At least I thought it could be, until I learned how hard it is to keep the ball up in the air.”
The Karate Kid kept it up. Bonnie Timmermann, the casting director, had been impressed with Macchio’s work in The Outsiders, and in 1983 brought him in to meet director John G. Avildsen; Macchio was thrilled to meet the man behind Rocky. Avildsen had been looking at other young actors for the role, including Charlie Sheen and Robert Downey Jr, but as soon as he got Macchio on tape, he was sold. He then took Macchio to meet the screenwriter, Robert Mark Kamen, at Kamen’s Manhattan apartment. The writer, who’d trained in karate for some years after being beaten up by bullies, showed Macchio some blocking and punching moves; Macchio couldn’t do them. Kamen loved that. “I wanted a wimp,” he later recalled. “And Ralph is the paradigmatic wimp.” This makes sense — for the film, in which 17-year-old, fatherless Daniel Larusso learns karate from maintenance man Mr Miyagi (Pat Morita) after Johnny Lawrence and his gang beat him up, they needed an actor to go from zero to hero. Nevertheless, Macchio takes issue with Kamen’s recollection.
“I recall that day, and we don’t totally agree,” he says, not quite on board with the wimpiness of it all. Otherwise, though, not far off. “He described me as a stringbean, and that’s probably a good description. He also said there was a cocky arrogance about me, and he was probably right — that was just my Long Island thing. That’s what I obtained from being the smallest guy in the class. It was a little bit of a front. It paid off with Daniel Larusso, because he had a little bit of bravado, and if you stripped it away he didn’t have much backing for it.”
The title character was originally named Danny Weber, but as soon as the Italian Macchio was cast, that was changed to Daniel Larusso. And as soon as he began working with Morita, Macchio’s concerns about the script’s cheesiness vanished. “Those were
the magic beans,” says Macchio. “Once Pat and I walked into a room, all those other concerns just fell away. There was just something very special about that union.”
The Karate Kid may be cheesy, but its sincerity wins out — it’s a supreme crowdpleaser, and it pleased many crowds in the summer of 1984, making $130 million from an $8 million budget. Macchio knew they were onto something a month before the film was released, at a New York preview screening. He went in, he remembers, maybe recognisable to a handful of people who might have seen The Outsiders, and left the cinema being cheered, while audience members attempted the climactic crane-kick on the street. The Karate Kid was about to go big. Which, at first, seemed like a good thing.
He followed The Karate Kid with a lead role in Walter Hill’s guitar drama Crossroads and then, in 1986, The Karate Kid Part II. In July ’86, just after the sequel was released, he starred alongside his hero Robert De Niro in drug-drama play Cuba And His Teddy Bear, at Manhattan’s Longacre Theatre, to this day De Niro’s only Broadway credit. Macchio played his son.
“I was crapping my pants,” he says of meeting De Niro for the first time at his audition. “I was so nervous. I had a big monologue to do, a scene to play with him. And I think that energy worked, some of that vulnerability. When I did the monologue he sat in the back and then asked me if I was available.” Just as Coppola had encouraged Macchio to act more honestly, De Niro, he says, got him to go with the flow each evening rather than going through the motions of what had already worked. “It took a while for him to get through to me on that, a while for me to relax into it.”
Meanwhile, The Karate Kid Part II — an inferior instalment but not without heart, the Macchio/morita partnership still holding up — was blowing up. In terms of sheer adulation, 1986 was Macchio’s biggest moment. Crossroads was still in cinemas, and it was… a lot. “I was on Broadway with Robert De Niro, and both movies were playing, one after the other across the street,” he says. “That was my Beatles-at-shea-stadium moment, that summer, where walking from one side of the street to the other got pretty loud, with a lot of young-teen screams, and getting into the car... there was a window of that.”
That window didn’t stay open too long. The Karate Kid Part II made $130 million — the same as the original — but 1989’s third, trashy instalment made a measly $39 million. Let alone the fact that Macchio was, at 27, still playing a teenager. Promoting the film on Entertainment Tonight, he talked about how hard it was for Hollywood to see him as anyone else, that he was still viewed as young and angelic. “I started feeling the trap of the Karate Kid typecasting,” he says now, “and the fact that I was getting older but still looking young for my age — that was the beginning of a challenging period.”
He had to fight to even get into the room for 1992’s Joe Pesci comedy-drama My Cousin Vinny, where he played a young man falsely accused of murder — 20th Century Fox thought the Karate Kid would be too distracting and wanted a fresher face, more interested in Will Smith or Ben Stiller, but director Jonathan Lynn met Macchio, thought he was perfect, and cast him. Things, though, all but dried up after that.
“The truth is, there were certainly more than a handful of days where it was like, ‘Wow. This is, kind of, maybe, over,’” he says. “It was hard. There were the tough days where I was down about it, where everybody still knew me from the movies but I couldn’t push my way through the door to find something of worth. There was plenty of stuff to do, but I chose not to do a lot of shit. I chose not to do a lot of crap. You’ll find some. But I really did not just string one after another.” Instead, he focused on family, raising his kids, and began writing his own scripts and directing some short films. “As long as I was creative, I was cool,” he says. “It’s when
I stopped being creative and waited for the phone to ring, those were the days that were not good days.”
The last thing he wanted to do was more Karate Kid, or anything like it. But the legacy loomed large, and within time he began to embrace it. In 2007, William Zabka directed a music video for ‘Sweep The Leg’ by the band No More Kings, in which he returned as Johnny Lawrence; Macchio cameoed at the end. Then in 2010, Macchio came up with his own idea. “The Karate Kid
remake was about to launch,” he says of the Will Smith-produced reboot starring his son Jaden. Macchio wasn’t involved. “I said to myself, ‘I cannot just sit here and watch this movie come out. I can’t just be sitting at home with nothing to do.’” He had the idea for a mockumentary about himself being encouraged to shed his nice-guy image by involving himself in a scandal, about needing “to get f-d up in order for him to be relevant in the media.” It was called Wax On, Fuck Off.
“I walked into [comedy production company/website] Funny Or Die, and I said the title and I don’t even think I got the ‘Off’ out before they said, ‘Let’s do this.’ It was my chance to do all this stuff I have to hear on the street [about me], on my terms. It was the only time I’d done the crane pose since I did it in 1984, because it was on my terms.” At one point in the four-minute short, about to go out on the town, Macchio hoovers up a load of cocaine then says to himself, “Bonsai, motherfucker.” And he does indeed crane-kick someone in a bar before fleeing.
The Karate Kid was an inescapable part of his life — playing with its legacy got him some kudos. And other people were interested in playing with it too. Something was happening.
Macchio had reunited with Zabka at Pat Morita’s funeral in 2005. They’d never been close. “PostKarate Kid I’d had little interaction with William,” he says. “I hadn’t seen him in 20 years. At Pat’s funeral it was a reconnection, from a whole different perspective — we were there mourning a friend. He wasn’t just the actor who played the asshole in the movie — all of a sudden we became more connected as human beings, and friends.”
Zabka was interested in doing something again with The Karate Kid. Macchio — who was scoring some interesting roles, including Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano in 2012’s Hitchcock — halfagreed that there might be somewhere to go with it, but neither knew where, exactly. Besides, many people had pitched ideas to Macchio over the years, most of them awful. His favourite awful idea was when someone took him and John G. Avildsen to lunch and suggested a film in which Daniel Larusso and Rocky Balboa’s two kids get together and open a dojo. “That lunch didn’t last too long,” says Macchio. “I was just, ‘Yeah, this is not gonna work.’”
Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg and Josh Heald are lifelong Karate Kid fans. Even the third film. Hurwitz and Schlossberg wrote the Harold & Kumar films; Heald wrote Hot Tub Time Machine. But all the while, what they really wanted to do was bring back The Karate Kid. They approached Zabka first, who was in Hot Tub Time Machine, telling him of their idea for a series revisiting Larusso and Lawrence in the present day, with Larusso as a successful and somewhat brash car salesman, and Lawrence as a down-and-out wino. The show would also introduce us to their kids, and stoke the fires of the old rivalry all over again. Zabka went for it — but then they had to climb Mount Macchio. They knew it would be a challenge.
“Yes, they had all their intel,” he says. “They were all kind of tip-toeing around me.” But over a three-hour lunch in Tribeca, they won him over. “As I started listening and peeling the onionlayers off this concept, I saw the freshness in it,” he says. What he liked most was that Cobra Kai offered three-dimensional characters, exploring all the grey areas — much more than the films ever did. “There was still a leap of faith, but I knew now was the time,” he says. “I just trusted my gut.”
The writers and Macchio and Zabka then pitched the show to multiple streamers. Many were interested, including Netflix, but all wanted to be part of the creative development, except for Youtube, who were beginning a subscription model and just told them to go make the show. Macchio, meanwhile, had scored a supporting role as a corrupt cop on HBO’S 1970s-set drama The Deuce. On set, he told them what he was up to. “I said, ‘I’m doing a Youtube show about The Karate Kid 34 years later.’ They were like, ‘Okay, buddy, good luck with that.’ The low expectations were quite awesome for us.”
Indeed, when it debuted in 2018, Cobra Kai surprised everybody with its all-round excellence, its wit, its superlative character work, its nuanced performances. After they shot the third series, they got word that further funding would not be forthcoming for scripted shows at Youtube, so once again they shopped the show around town, this time with an entire new series in the can. Netflix jumped on it, sticking up the first two seasons in August 2020, then the third in January 2021. With most of the world in lockdown, people stuck at home were desperate for good television, and Cobra Kai fever took hold.
With previous seasons having seen the return of characters from the first two films, including Martin Kove’s Kreese and Elisabeth Shue’s Ali, the upcoming fourth season brings back the villain from The Karate Kid Part III: giggling, pony-tailed aggressor Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith). Macchio is upfront about his disappointment with the film, but bringing Silver into the Cobra Kai world, he says, is a chance to reclaim it. “There is no way in hell I thought there’d be a day I’d be standing across from Thomas Ian Griffith, talking about the events of The Karate Kid Part III,” he says. “It’s a chance to take something that did not work for me and try to make fruit out of it. Season 4 is next level.” Outside of Cobra Kai, Macchio would love to do more work akin to what he did in The Deuce. “There’s nothing wrong with doing your bread and butter, but it was fun to play a guy who was kind of unredeemable,” he says. “I would love those types of opportunities. They’re not so easy to get.” But he does love being Larusso again, certainly with him written as richly as he is now. In those lean times, when he’d had more than enough of the guy, he was searching for something more creatively rewarding. The answer, it turned out, was there all along. Macchio, staggeringly, has just turned 60. But he’ll always be the Karate Kid. And right now, that’s pretty cool.