A young actor who wasn’t raised in Los Angeles, didn’t have a showbiz manager for a parent, and didn’t come from a famous family is refreshing. Born in Portland, Maine, on January 5, 2006, Griffin Santopietro’s path seemed more accidental than planned, at least from the outside. He was hardly a teenager when he was cast as Anthony LaRusso in Cobra Kai. However, something was obviously present from the start.
Not exactly a Hollywood pedigree, his father, Dr. John Santopietro, is a senior vise president at Hartford HealthCare’s Behavioral Health Network. However, the family listened. During a children’s theater production in the second grade, something changed for Griffin, who was the middle of three boys. Griffin, who was an introvert by nature, just changed on stage, according to his father’s later memories. That’s the kind of thing a parent notices once and remembers.
Growing up, the three Santopietro brothers—Max, Griffin, and Beckett—made home movies on their iPhones by pretending to be family members and acting out scenes from Marvel movies. It sounds like typical kid stuff. However, in retrospect, it’s difficult to avoid seeing those living room productions as preliminary practice runs for something more serious. Eventually, Max went to college to study musical theater. Griffin went in a different direction.
With his mother Kathy navigating the frequently unglamorous world of child acting—the callbacks that didn’t work out, the near-roles, the long drives—Gryphon began taking formal acting lessons and traveling to New York City for auditions. His father was open about it: Gryphon had to learn how to deal with rejection at a young age because he was on the verge of getting a lot of parts that ended up going to someone else. Repeated near-misses like that are either discouraging or illuminating. It appears to have been the latter for Griffin.
Alongside Chris Rock in the Adam Sandler film The Week Of, he received his first significant professional break. He was eleven years old. Through the experience, he became familiar with the routines of a professional film set, including the hierarchy of people who have been doing this for decades, the waiting, and teamwork. Working with Sandler at that age may have provided him with a real-world education that no acting course could match.
Before the Netflix era, before the massive viewership, and before it became one of the most talked-about streaming revivals, the show was still on YouTube Red when he tried out for Cobra Kai. He was cast as Ralph Macchio’s on-screen son, Anthony LaRusso, and over the course of several seasons, he developed into a character with genuine narrative weight. When the show shared a Father’s Day picture of Griffin and Macchio together, his father found it especially bizarre. “Cool,” he remarked. And a bit strange.
Griffin has made appearances in episodes of New Amsterdam and Bull in addition to Cobra Kai, giving the impression that he is more concerned with longevity than visibility. Along with fellow cast members Dallas Dupree Young and Oona O’Brien, he also made an appearance as a guest on Lone Lobos, the podcast hosted by his co-stars Xolo Maridueña and Jacob Bertrand. This is the kind of informal, sincere camaraderie that doesn’t always exist on set but obviously does here.
Griffin Santopietro, a 20-year-old from Maine, is no longer the shy youngster creating iPhone movies in his kitchen. However, he still exudes a sense of groundedness that makes him seem less like a meticulously crafted persona and more like a person who entered this because he genuinely enjoys it. In this industry, that’s less common than it might seem, and it’s probably something to be aware of.
