‘Sorry to ask such a personal question,” I say to Ralph Macchio, who at 63 we can no longer call The Karate Kid. Let’s go together with karate man. He’s in the basement of his home in Los Angeles. “My daughter’s working upstairs, my son’s working, I’ve been relegated to the dungeon,” he says. I proceed: “So exactly how good are you at karate?”
Forty-one years since he first grew to become Daniel LaRusso, Macchio is again in the function for Karate Kid: Legends. In this fictive universe, it’s three years since the finish of Netflix series Cobra Kai and LaRusso has settled into his gardening gloves and embraced the spirit of his personal mentor, Mr Miyagi, whose sleek, defensive karate model, Miyagi-Do, was all about by no means wanting for a struggle. Jackie Chan (reprising the function of Mr Han from the 2010 reboot The Karate Kid) involves beg of him yet another job.
No spoilers, in fact, however to have been successful at this for greater than 41 years, the masks should absolutely have turn into the face: he should be really good? “I should really be the world champion,” Macchio says. “If I truly had trained for 41 years, every day, that’s probably where I’d be, or I would have so many broken bones and pulled muscles that I’d have moved on. It was easier when I was in my early 20s, now it’s much tougher. I’m not as limber. But I passed my black belt in Gōjū-ryū, that Miyagi-Do style we did in the Cobra Kai series. It’s far more defensive and less flamboyant than some of the super flippy styles.”
In Karate Kid: Legends, Mr Han is mentoring a youngster, Li Fong (Ben Wang). He’s the key svengali, little question, however LaRusso arrives halfway by, to introduce some karate to spice up the kung fu. “You make a Karate Kid movie,” Macchio says, “you better have a great kid, right? He’s wonderful.” He is great – with a humorous, barely anxious face, like a trainee accountant who thinks he doesn’t like events, however is really stoked to have been invited to 1. “He’s my favourite thing in the movie,” says Macchio. “He does almost all his own stunts, he’s really doing the work.”
The entire movie is a love letter to combating with coronary heart. I’d not have predicted how pleasant that may be. Macchio makes a stab at explaining the allure of the choreography. “The camera’s very inside the fights – the Karate Kid films that I made, certainly the first movie, was very cinematic, wide, you saw everything happen. This has a lot of cuts, it’s a bit jarring but it’s exciting. It’s 2025, this is how they make movies now. The Marvelisation of fight scenes, along with the video gamification-isation, and the desensitisation of the younger viewers, it’s nice to bring it back and feel that you’re in it.”
But you’ll be able to’t perceive the longevity of the Karate Kid franchise with out participating with the sport itself. “Hopefully the through-line, which has always been the theme of the Karate Kid universe, is that fighting is always the last answer to the problem,” Macchio says. “It’s all about training and how to build confidence and how to defend yourself, but always with the question: at what point do you use these skills? When everything else has failed. Those roots are the grounding of martial arts, which were never intended to build warriors to kill people.”
After the first Karate Kid iteration, Macchio made different movies, notably My Cousin Vinny, “a late-for-dinner movie. You’re just going to be late for dinner because you have to wait for every scene, the way it sets up and pays off.” But he didn’t get a whole lot of work. “I was doing smaller roles or writing more and directing shorts,” he says of those lean years, “but I had a lot of time for my kids.”
They weren’t wild about the Karate Kid movies. “When you’re four years old, you don’t really want to watch your dad get beat up,” he says. And he didn’t attempt to instil any martial arts. “No, not only did I not teach them that, I didn’t teach them how to use the chopsticks. They think I can catch flies with them, but that was a little bit of movie magic.”
It was greater than the college run that saved Macchio on the margins of Hollywood for mainly 20 years. “Being a celebrity is what I didn’t take to. I’ve always kept one foot in and one foot out. And sometimes you need to have both feet in to survive the game.” He might need additionally been slightly too pure. “At the end of the game, it’s show business,” he says, by no means sounding extra Italian American than with that emphasis, “so they’re trying to say, OK, how can we milk this and create the next return on investment, while I’m trying to protect the truth of the character.”
He appeared in HBO’s sequence The Deuce, which is good, however his function was small. He didn’t thoughts that. “Four scenes or an arc in a great indie film, that’s attractive as well. Being the guy, being the franchise, it comes with a lot of responsibility and pressure.” In 2005, Pat Morita, who’d performed Mr Miyagi, died of kidney failure, and Macchio and Billy Zabka, who performed LaRusso’s authentic arch-enemy Johnny Lawrence, have been in the similar room for the first time in years.
“If you would have told me then, Billy Zabka would be one of my best friends … There was about 20 years that I hadn’t seen him. We were at the funeral, it was a really poignant moment. I was nervous because I was about to speak, there was a bunch of emotions. I looked across, and I saw Billy, and for the first time, it was like we were on the same side of the mat, because we were both there to honour our friend.”
Zabka was rather more open to revisiting the Karate Kid franchise; Macchio says he’d stated no “for thirtysomething years”. Then Cobra Kai got here alongside. Its creators, Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg are (*41*) Macchio says. “They know way more about that film than I do. Listen, it’s 65 episodes. That’s a heck of a run, during the pandemic and everything else. We were the comfort food when there was nothing else to watch.”
Karate Kid: Legends is an extremely warming, fairly harmless, ensemble piece, wherein you really root for the younger solid in concord, like watching Fame. Their private triumphs and disasters are all routed by bodily self-discipline, however it takes such a reassuring rhythm that you simply by no means have any doubt they’ll get there. I keep in mind my child saying, “What I take from this is that literally everybody can become the best person in the world at karate.” Which is form of the level of the authentic movie, that any child can win, simply by attempting. It’s an elegy to stickability that it appears no one can get sufficient of, no matter their technology.
“I was just in Mexico City,” says Macchio. “There must have been 10,000 people looking at the entrance to the film premiere, chanting my name, ages eight to 80, as if I was a matador. Come on! That’s a wonderful thing to be a part of.”
