‘Sorry to ask such a personal question,” I say to Ralph Macchio, who at 63 we can no longer callThe Karate Kid. Let’s go with karate man. He’s in the basement of his house in Los Angeles. “My daughter’s working upstairs, my son’s working, I’ve been relegated to the dungeon,” he says. I continue: “So exactly how good are you at karate?”
Forty-one years since he first became Daniel LaRusso, Macchio is back in the role for Karate Kid: Legends. In this fictive universe, it’s three years since the end ofNetflix series Cobra Kaiand LaRusso has settled into his gardening gloves and embraced the spirit of his own mentor, Mr Miyagi, whose graceful, defensive karate style, Miyagi-Do, was all about never looking for a fight. Jackie Chan (reprising the role of Mr Han from the 2010 reboot The Karate Kid) comes to beg of him one more job.
No spoilers, of course, but to have been winning at this for more than 41 years, the mask must surely have become the face: he must 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 teenager, Li Fong (Ben Wang). He’s the key svengali, no doubt, but LaRusso arrives midway through, to introduce some karate to boost the kung fu. “You make a Karate Kid movie,” Macchio says, “you better have a great kid, right? He’s wonderful.” Heiswonderful – with a funny, slightly anxious face, like a trainee accountant who thinks he doesn’t like parties, but is really stoked to have been invited to one. “He’s my favourite thing in the movie,” says Macchio. “He does almost all his own stunts, he’s really doing the work.”
The whole film is a love letter to fighting with heart. I would not have predicted how enjoyable that would be. Macchio makes a stab at explaining the charm 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 can’t understand the longevity of the Karate Kid franchise without engaging 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 other films, 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 lot of work. “I was doing smaller roles or writing more and directing shorts,” he says of these lean years, “but I had a lot of time for my kids.”
They weren’t wild about the Karate Kid films. “When you’re four years old, you don’t really want to watch your dad get beat up,” he says. And he didn’t try 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 more than the school run that kept Macchio on the margins of Hollywood for basically 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 have also been a little too pure. “At the end of the game, it’s showbusiness,” he says, never sounding more 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 series The Deuce, which is brilliant, but his role was small. He didn’t mind 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 played Mr Miyagi, died of kidney failure, and Macchio and Billy Zabka, who played LaRusso’s original arch-enemy Johnny Lawrence, were in the same 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 much more open to revisiting the Karate Kid franchise; Macchio says he’d said no “for thirtysomething years”. Then Cobra Kai came along. Its creators,Josh Heald,Jon HurwitzandHayden Schlossbergare “some of the biggest Karate Kid fans I’ve ever met,” 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 incredibly warming, quite innocent, ensemble piece, in which you really root for the young cast in harmony, like watching Fame. Their personal triumphs and disasters are all routed through physical discipline, but it takes such a reassuring rhythm that you never have any doubt they’ll get there. I remember my kid saying, “What I take from this is that literally everybody can become the best person in the world at karate.” Which is kind of the point of the original film, that any kid can win, just by trying. It’s an elegy to stickability that it seems nobody can get enough of, whatever their generation.
“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.”
Karate Kid: Legends is released on 30 May