Miguel Diaz was never meant to play the simple part. He begins the show as a bullied child in a brand-new apartment building, stumbles into a washed-up neighbor’s karate class, and spends the next six seasons being knocked down in ways that are occasionally physical and other times much more difficult to shake. From the first episode until the 2025 finale, Xolo Maridueña carried all of that, and it’s worth getting to know him.
Maridueña was born in Los Angeles on June 9, 2001. He was raised in El Sereno, a neighborhood in the city’s east with strong Latino ties and little foot traffic from Hollywood. He began training at the Boyle Heights community theater group CASA 0101 when he was about ten years old. He began learning how to inhabit a character instead of just acting one there. It is evident.
Modeling for a Sears catalog was his first job as a professional actor. At the age of eleven, he then secured a recurring role in the NBC drama Parenthood, eventually rising to the position of series regular. Given how young he was when filming started in 2017, it is easy to forget that Cobra Kai had years of experience on set by the time he knocked.
There is a certain texture to the story of how he learned he was cast that makes it worth sharing. That afternoon, he received two calls. The first confirmed the part and came from the show’s creators. The second came from Ralph Macchio, who, according to Maridueña, mispronounced his name as “Zolo.” The young actor’s phone had a one percent battery. Throughout the entire call, he was afraid it would end and Macchio would think he had hung up. It survived. Later on, Macchio claimed that Maridueña was “perfect from the start.”
There is a lanky, earnest quality to Maridueña on screen that makes you believe Miguel’s journey—the victories, the spinal injury, the protracted recovery, the complex relationships. William Zabka, who plays Johnny Lawrence, described a similar immediate certainty: “We knew right away that that was our Miguel.” It doesn’t read like a performance. It reads like a child going thru something.
Maridueña’s cultural specificity was what gave the role its special significance. Miguel Diaz was written with the San Fernando Valley’s actual demographics in mind. This decision was deliberate and, to be honest, long overdue for a show that takes place in that area of Los Angeles. Maridueña, who has Mexican, Cuban, and Ecuadorian ancestry, collaborated with the authors to create Miguel’s plot while keeping his Ecuadorian heritage in mind. He has been clear about the stakes. One in two people in Los Angeles are Latino, he stated bluntly in one interview. That is rarely the case on a typical Hollywood set. He wants that gap to be closed by the industry.
Maridueña has ventured into areas that would have seemed improbable for a young person from El Sereno performing in Boyle Heights theater since Cobra Kai concluded. He became the first Latino superhero lead in a live-action DC movie when he portrayed Jaime Reyes in Blue Beetle in 2023. Alongside Rihanna, he provided the voice of Brainy Smurf in the 2025 animated Smurfs movie. He will portray Portgas D. Ace in the Netflix adaptation of One Piece and in Practical Magic 2. The trajectory is steep and seems well-deserved thus far.
Observing Maridueña’s career from a distance gives me the impression that the industry is still figuring out how best to use him. The Blue Beetle was not level. There are still some unanswered questions about the upcoming projects. That’s a big deal. In a way, it begins with a sixteen-year-old child in El Sereno whose phone almost died at the worst possible time.
