Cobra Kai managed to reference many characters and story arcs from the Karate Kid movies that came before it, but it never brought back Julie Pierce, played by Hilary Swank in The Next Karate Kid. Series creators Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg just opened up about this one major missing piece in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, revealing that they tried hard to get Swank on board. In the end, the producers never got a chance to meet with Swank to pitch their ideas, and it sounds like she wasn’t interested regardless of what part they might write for her. With the series now over, it’s one of the few lingering disappointments for these creators.
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“We did reach out in the very early days before the season to see if there was a path [for her to appear],” Heald confirmed. “We had an inkling of an idea about how she could come into this story and not have to commit to 10 episodes or something. It was going to feel like it could be a one- or two-episode arc, similar to what we did with Elisabeth Shue, where you can bring Ali back in at a pivotal moment and affect an important relationship.”
As Heald referenced, the producers on Cobra Kai have had great success pitching their ideas to previous series stars and luring them in. In fact, the show itself essentially started this way as they convinced William Zabka and Ralph Macchio to participate. They also secured Yuji Okumoto to reprise his role as Chozen Toguchi, Sean Kanan to play Mike Barnes, Thomas Griffith to play Terry Silver, and many others.
With all this experience and “the beginnings of a genesis of an idea” for writing Swank’s character Julie into the plot, Heald said that he and the producers reached out to Swank’s team “to find out if we could have a discussion with her about it and introduce ourselves.” They never got that chance, so the hopes of seeing Julie in the modern era stopped there.
“On her end, it was very respectful, but we never got that opportunity to sit down and pour our heart out the way that we typically do when we bring back characters from the legacy,” Heald said. “She was just in a place where she wasn’t looking to do that. She had had babies. I think she was in production on something at the time, and it was a respectful pass on even the idea of a meeting. She didn’t want us to go through the trouble of flying out to her and putting our heart on the sleeve because it just wasn’t something she was ready to do at that moment.”
Cobra Kai may be over, but Heald and the others are already working on possible spinoff shows set in “the Miyagi-verse.” They are holding out hope that Swank may agree to appear in one of those. In the meantime, Cobra Kai is streaming now on Netflix.
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