When you see Johnny Lawrence sitting by himself in his Reseda apartment early in Cobra Kai, with a beer in hand, a bare mattress on the floor, and ESPN on a tiny TV, you realize that this is where the antagonist from The Karate Kid ended up. It’s not exactly meant to be humorous. It’s simply true. Johnny hasn’t moved on thirty-four years after losing a karate competition to a youngster from New Jersey. Not at all.
William Zabka agreed to that idea in 2018, and it proved to be one of the most innovative choices in recent television history. Cobra Kai, which debuted on YouTube and ran on Netflix until 2025, took a character that viewers had dismissed as a bully and posed a genuinely intriguing question: what made him that way, and is it too late to change? The conclusion, developed over the course of six seasons, is that it’s never totally too late, but it comes at a cost.
Johnny Lawrence was born into a cold home. When he was five, his father abandoned him. His mother remarried a cruel and contemptuous stepfather who made fun of a child for stopping drum lessons. When Johnny, then thirteen, happened upon the Cobra Kai dojo while riding his bicycle thru Encino, he felt a sense of belonging and structure. He was directed by John Kreese. It’s risky to give a boy who doesn’t yet know who he is a philosophy based on violence and the repression of doubt.
Johnny has spent decades paying for decisions he made as a teenager by the time Cobra Kai starts. He was not present when his son Robby was born. He was a handyman. He overindulged in alcohol. He’s not the swaggering, self-assured bully from the first movie; instead, he’s a lost middle-aged man who has lost more than just karate. In interviews, Zabka put it simply: the crane kick wasn’t merely a setback. The true injury was when Kreese, the mentor he had trusted, attacked him in that parking lot afterward. The entire show gradually uncovers that betrayal, which had been hidden for thirty years.
The fact that Johnny is never totally self-aware is what makes him a compelling character and what Zabka brings to the performance with a kind of subtle precision. He imparts to his pupils the Cobra Kai rules he was taught as a child, but when they go too far, he clearly feels uneasy. In a way that he couldn’t handle with his own son, he is devoted to Miguel Diaz. Perhaps for the first time in his adult life, he truly loves Carmen. He’s not a self-realized man. He is a man who is gradually discovering who he is in real time, frequently making mistakes and sometimes succeeding.
That could be the reason why so many visitors to Cobra Kai who were looking for nostalgia stayed for Johnny. From the beginning, the show’s creators presented it as a story of redemption, but they were astute enough to avoid making the redemption simple or swift. After stumbling thru five and a half seasons, Zabka’s Johnny finally finds some semblance of peace, first with Kreese in a hallway scene that Zabka has said is crucial to the ending succeeding at all, and then with Daniel, Robby, and himself. He gets married to Carmen. He is a coach. He is the episode’s director.
There’s something that resonates with you after seven years of watching that arc. In the traditional sense, Johnny Lawrence is not a remarkable man. He lacks the eloquence and wisdom typical of TV characters who are supposed to be likable. He makes references to vintage action films. The internet is beyond his comprehension. He frequently says the incorrect thing and is aware of it after the fact. However, he consistently appears, which is more than many people—real or imagined—manage to do.
Ultimately, Cobra Kai’s portrayal of Johnny Lawrence conveys the idea that a person who has been negatively shaped by their environment can still choose to change, albeit slowly and imperfectly.
