Why Cobra Kai Never Brought Back That One Major Karate Kid Character

Now that it’s over, we can safely say Cobra Kai did it all. It checked seemingly every single box a fan of The Karate Kid franchise could’ve wanted, while also servicing all of the new characters introduced on the show.

Well, with one exception.

You know the one. It’s the one everyone has been asking for for years. The one that didn’t happen in the final episodes. So now that the show is over,  we decided to ask the creators Hayden Schlossberg, Josh Heald and Jon Hurwitz if this person’s return was ever even in the cards. There are no spoilers below except that the person doesn’t show up.

We’re talking, of course, about Hilary Swank, the multiple Oscar-winning actress who, before all that, appeared as Mr. Miyagi’s other student, Julie Pierce, in 1994’s The Last Karate Kid. Since Cobra Kai debuted, and made a point to bring back so many stars of the original franchise, everyone has wondered if Swank would show up and share some knowledge or memories about Miyagi. Well, she didn’t, and now that she hasn’t, we asked the team it was ever even under consideration.

“It’s one of those situations where we always explore,” Schlossberg told io9. “We try to find out what the options are because we don’t control all these actors’ lives. It was no guarantee that we were going to get Yuji [Okumoto] or Thomas Ian Griffith back. So we explored it. But we learned pretty quickly that that wasn’t going to happen in the final season.”

“With Julie Pierce, it was something that we would have loved to have done,” Hurwitz added. “But one of the things we always say is, ‘Things happen for a reason.’ And creatively, it actually worked out totally fine. And we’re thrilled with how the season ended up.”

“And I’ll say there’s no lost episode out there,” Heald said. “We didn’t get deep enough where we’re like, ‘Here it is.’ And now we have to totally shift. We explored very early to just make that relationship and see if it was possible. And the timing was such that it just couldn’t work out. And we wrote knowing that. So we didn’t have any kind of remorse.”

There you have it, Cobra Kai fans. At a certain point there was an attempt to bring Swank into the universe, but it didn’t work out and was never planned for. Maybe we’ll see her in Karate Kid Legends, or whatever project these three have next. But probably not.

All episodes of Cobra Kai are now streaming on Netflix.

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