A show that began as a YouTube original and went on to become one of Netflix’s most popular shows, garnering six billion minutes of viewing time and spanning three different release windows, seems a little ridiculous. But that’s exactly what happened with Cobra Kai, and the cast themselves may be the most overlooked aspect of the entire narrative, not the plot twists or the tournament brackets. The characters in season 6 have backgrounds that make the fiction seem strangely humble in contrast to their gi tops and staged spin kicks.
Let’s start with Rayna Vallandingham, who portrays Zara Malik, the formidable Iron Dragons warrior first seen in Part 2. She’s not doing martial arts as most actors do, picking up a few moves and using deft camera cuts to project confidence. Vallandingham holds a fourth-degree black belt and has won the American Taekwondo Association world championship thirteen times.
At the age of two, she began training. She became one of the youngest black belts to win a world championship when she was eight years old. Her fight scenes in Cobra Kai have a weight that is difficult to replicate, a precision that results from decades of competition rather than weeks of practice. The strange thing is that she had never seen the show before getting the part because it was too similar to her own life. It’s possible that her performance felt so natural and grounded because of that kind of distance.
The showrunners envisioned the Iron Dragons dojo as the karate equivalent of the New England Patriots during the Tom Brady dynasty, and Lewis Tan was cast as Sensei Wolf, the team’s leader. Tan, who is best known for his roles in Deadpool & Wolverine and 2021’s Mortal Kombat as Cole Young, brought his own martial arts training and an almost unsettling physicality to the part. Tan would actually give Daniel and Johnny a run for their money, according to co-creator Hayden Schlossberg, and after seeing the Barcelona tournament scenes, that assessment doesn’t seem overly dramatic.
C.S. Lee’s casting as Master Kim Sun-Yung is one of the more subdued casting choices that merits greater consideration. In the past, the character had only made flashback appearances, portrayed by various actors in the early Cobra Kai seasons and the original Karate Kid movies. Lee brought a completely different energy—controlled, severe, and historically loaded. He was best known for years as the cheerfully eccentric forensics analyst Vince Masuka on Dexter. It’s the kind of recasting that typically feels startling, but Lee was surprisingly at ease in the mythology. It’s another matter entirely whether Dexter fans even knew who he was.
Then there are the specifics that satisfy the compulsive rewatcher. A promotional flier for Stingray in season six uses what looks to be a real childhood photo of William Zabka rather than Paul Walter Hauser, the character’s actor. A production team winking at the audience without making an announcement is the kind of Easter egg that seems almost too clever. Additionally, Sean Kanan, who made a comeback as Mike Barnes for the last arc, was initially cast in The Karate Kid Part III in part because he had actual black belt credentials in both Shotokan and Shito-Ryu karate. Those same abilities carried over into his Cobra Kai return decades later, with a naturalness that rehearsal alone couldn’t match.
Cast interviews also reveal how much the Atlanta filming experience influenced the performances. The younger actors, including Xolo Maridueña, Tanner Buchanan, Mary Mouser, Peyton List, and Jacob Bertrand, have talked about intense endurance training sessions that made it difficult to distinguish between preparation and camaraderie. After long days of stunt choreography, we shared meals. The kind of tiredness that takes away performance and leaves behind something more genuine. In an interview with Rotten Tomatoes before the final season premiere, Buchanan discussed Robby’s biggest flaw being impaired judgment due to elevated emotions. It seems that by the end, the actor’s relationship with the material had become equally raw.
With a new Karate Kid movie already in the works, it’s still unclear if a franchise this expansive will ever completely let go of these actors or this specific chemistry. Watching Ralph Macchio and William Zabka navigate a final season that knows it’s the last one is both heartwarming and a little depressing because they have been circling each other’s gravitational pull since 1984.
The nostalgia was carried by the legacy cast. The physical credibility was carried by the newcomers, especially Vallandingham and Tan. A show about teenagers learning karate in the San Fernando Valley, which had a cast whose real lives were frequently stranger and more impressive than the fiction they inhabited, managed to end on a global stage in Barcelona somewhere in the middle.
