This last Cobra Kai interview is really all spoilers. I tried to ask some general stuff, but the last five episodes are such a conclusion that each question led to a spoiler. So we held this interview until after the weekend the Cobra Kai finale aired. Still, Spoiler Warning. This is for people who have watched all five of the final episodes of Cobra Kai on Netflix.

Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg, and Josh Heald created the show for YouTube Originals in 2018. In revisiting The Karate Kid from Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka)’s perspective, they recontextualized ‘80s movie villains for a modern era. They brought back movie hero Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and villains John Kreese (Martin Kove) and Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith).

They also introduced many original characters, including a whole new generation of high school Karate kids. Season six saw Miyagi-Do face Cobra Kai and other international dojos at the Seikai Taikai tournament. The finale resolves not only the championship, but lingering emotional traumas going back to the 1984 film.

Was it cathartic to get to resolve and pay off all these relationships and not have to dangle threads for another season?

Jon Hurwitz: “It was beautiful. We’ve been building towards this end for a very long time now. Certainly with Johnny and Daniel and Kreese, we had a sense of where we were headed with these characters. There’s a lot of conflict and, listen, sometimes it gets tiresome to just keep throwing conflict at these characters over and over again. You just want them all to be happy. We were of the belief that this deserved a big 1980s-style Hollywood ending that is crowd pleasing and thrilling and a hell of a lot of fun. It was a complete blast to write it, to make it, to edit it, and we’re thrilled with how it turned out.”

Was William Zabka waiting for a speech like that confession to Kreese, and Martin Kove too?

Josh Heald: “I think we were all waiting for it. The moment we were bringing back Kreese, they both had questions in terms of where this relationship was going to go. We knew that it would have a lot of ups and downs and twists and turns, that there would be a Kreese redemption. There would be Kreese double-crossing. There would be Kreese getting double-crossed. There would be Johnny turning his back on Cobra Kai forever. Every possible bit of soap opera you can get out of that relationship that was born out of trauma was going to flourish and run rampant during the series. We needed to bring things in, you have to have that conversation.

That conversation can really only go the way it went which is not a full forgiveness. It’s an acknowledgment that all this terrible stuff happened and these feelings of abandonment and abuse. Kreese isn’t expecting a forgiveness either. He just needs to say it and needs to know that it was heard and needs Johnny to know that it’s genuine.

We liked playing with all those colors on the page and we loved seeing it on its feet and seeing how hard they both lean into it. You feel it. The benefit of having that scene now in 2025 is it ties up a relationship that began in 1984. It’s not a relationship that was off-screen. It’s an on-screen relationship that is 40 years in the making. So it was thrilling for us. I can only imagine jumping into their shoes and being able to play that all these years later.”

Martin Kove has been saying if Kreese were to die, he’d want him to die sacrificing himself for the other characters. That’s kind of what happens. Did you incorporate Martin’s idea into the story?

Jon Hurwitz: “Where things end with Kreese was how we planned it from before we met Martin Kove. This is something that we’ve known from the beginning that we love the idea of in the endgame for Kreese to be redeemed as much as he could be redeemed and the greatest redemption for him is to not only apologize for the sins of the past but to truly sacrifice himself for Johnny Lawrence. That’s something that we’ve talked about for a long time. It’s something that we talked about with Marty for a long time. It’s something that maybe Marty wanted himself or something that maybe Marty has said in an interview knowing where we were headed with it. That’s been our plan all along with that character.

I do want to say, the scene with Johnny and Kreese where they finally have it out and Johnny says everything that he needed to say to Kreese is one of our favorite scenes that we’ve ever had on the show. The performance from both actors was amazing, especially Billy Zabka there. When we watch that scene, we see a teenager again. We see a vulnerable kid. For Billy to have gone to those places as a performer and for it to come across the way it does on screen is extremely powerful to us and both those guys. I’m glad we, 40 years later, were able to resolve that journey.”

Was it tricky to find ways to let even Terry Silver be vulnerable?

Hayden Schlossberg: “We love all the characters and we’re always thinking about how they perceive the world and thinking about things from their perspective. Thomas Ian Griffith is an amazing actor who is thinking about those things on his own. We talked together before every season and we love the idea of him having this terminal illness not just because it puts everything into perspective and increased the stakes for him as to all the stuff that he’s doing in the final season, but it also makes him a scary character for the fans because he has nothing to lose except destroy everyone’s hopes and dreams at the end. He’s a powerful guy and we wanted to explore it all. We wanted him to feel human but also willing to do monstrous things.”

Another surprise in the finale was the senseis having the tiebreaker fight. Did Johnny vs. Sensei Wolf have to be the most intense fight of the whole series?

Jon Hurwitz: “That was the goal. I’ll just say, casting the Wolf character was a real challenge to find somebody who had the intensity and the gravitas to go up against this character that audiences have known for a very, very long time. Certainly in our series, people have been very emotionally invested in Johnny. He’s fought a lot of guys over the years. To find Lewis Tan and for him to be as amazing of a fighter as Lewis is in real life, that’s a big part of it. But the performance and to be that kind of dark and ruthless in a world in which you have Terry Silver and Kreese on the show, he’s almost the scariest because he’s young and ready to go. You see the way he treats his students. That was a fight that was important to make Johnny’s opponent really formidable and then for us to bring the stakes of it to the forefront.

Again, speaking from a spoiler standpoint, Daniel and Johnny have that great scene where they’re talking about Rocky. You kind of feel like yeah, Johnny’s kind of already won in life. So does this fight really matter at the core other than winning this thing? But Sensei Wolf brings you back right into it in the locker room where even if intellectually you could say Johnny’s a winner, we know that the way Johnny processed that fight from 1984 and what happened there that if he loses this on this world stage, it’s something that he may never get over.”

At the same time, Lewis has had way more training than Billy even after six seasons of Cobra Kai, so how did you make that realistic but a fair match?

Josh Heald: “We wanted it to be Johnny experiencing life as an underdog. Almost every fight that Johnny’s encountered during this series, we’ve had a pretty good feeling like Johnny’s going to come out the other side. Even at times when he’s being bested, like in season five when Kim Da-Eun’s thugs have him near death, Johnny is still able to get a power up and clobber them all.

With this, we wanted to really create the biggest bad that Johnny would have to go against where he is physically outmatched. Age-wise, agility-wise he’s outmatched. Not to mention Wolf has gotten completely inside his head. To have a fight where Johnny is admitting for the first time that he’s doubting his ability to come through this fight victoriously was a place that we haven’t been yet and we wanted to be at and we felt would be valuable for Johnny and the audience to walk through. And lead to some believable suspense.

Movies can end like Rocky and Friday Night Lights, and it’s still a feel-good story with a loss at the end. That was a choice that we may have made. The only way you’re going to get there is if you treat your opponent believably.”

Did you actually film the running with the crowd on location in Encino?

Hayden Schlossberg: “We knew that we wanted to get some L.A. shooting in there for the final season. We knew that the final montage set to ‘The Best Around’ would be a crowd-pleaser. It’s something that we’ve kept in our back pocket this whole time along with the chopsticks callback. So we knew that we wanted some L.A. scenes in there. We knew that it was an homage to Rocky. We just felt like the idea of Johnny and Daniel jogging through the neighborhood, Reseda, Encino and then all of a sudden everyone coming together on Ventura probably causing a massive traffic jam. They don’t care about the rules. Johnny is just running in the middle of the street.

It was a really fun day of shooting being there in the heart of the valley with Ralph Macchio, Billy Zabka, and hundreds of fans, people that have been connected to our show. We basically just reached out to everyone in our circles and said, ‘Hey, you want to be a part of this fun moment?’ Josh’s kids are in that scene. My brother is someone that Johnny and Daniel run past. It was one of those really fun moments that we knew would be in the trailer.”

Was it also important to bring it back to the original strip mall dojo?

Jon Hurwitz: “Yes, that’s kind of in our minds the final scene of the show. There’s that little fun scene after that but it’s really Johnny Lawrence’s happiness, and I think what was happy for the fan base as well and for us as fans is to see Johnny back in his sweet spot, in that dojo with those words on the wall, with a group of students, teaching Cobra Kai the way that he knows how. But him teaching Cobra Kai with the perspective that he now has having gone through the journey of this series to harness those words, to be able to interpret them for a class full of students in a way where he understands the pitfalls, he understands the problems with it but he also understands the benefit of it and what he can bring to these students. It was really special to be there.

One thing that I should say, that I don’t think we’ve talked about in any other interview at this point, that’s the very first time that we filmed inside that dojo where it was in the location where the exterior was, the parking lot and everything like that. We always had that set was on a stage. It was built, that dojo, but we got rid of that dojo set when we got rid of it on the show. So we didn’t have it all these years later. So we were going to have to rebuild it one way or another. We were actually able to go to that location where we had the exterior set and build it within the confines of that building. So the dimensions were slightly different here and there because it was different but it felt like, for us being on set, we’re actually at the real Cobra Kai dojo. Johnny’s back there the way that it should be.”

So it ultimately begins and ends as Johnny’s story, right?

Josh Heald: “By reorienting the audience to be rooting for Johnny for the first time in this series, you have to be following that thread to its conclusion. That doesn’t step on all the character growth and story that Daniel has experienced, not just this season but during the series. Johnny just had more rooting interest because he was at a lower point in life when we started this. Johnny had more on the line with what a win means for his future and setting him on a positive course from here. So it was inevitable that it was always going to end with Johnny’s victory being at stake.”

The one cameo you never got was Hilary Swank. Did you talk to her and try to think of a scene for Julie Pierce?

Hayden Schlossberg: “Early on we reached out to her camp expressing interest to explore things. We had some ideas in mind for how we would bring her character into the show. It became clear pretty quickly that it wasn’t going to happen, not for any big salacious reason. We don’t actually own the rights to these human beings being on set. It was the type of story we felt wouldn’t be like a house of cards if she was there or not.

We certainly love her as an actress, love the Julie Pierce character so we wanted there to be a callback and something there that impacted our story in a big way. But we didn’t really develop it that much because it seemed early on that it just wasn’t going to happen. She just had two children, twins, there’s a million possible reasons why it wasn’t going to work out.

The thing for us is always just going in with the attitude of everything happens for a reason. From the very beginning, we had no guarantee that Thomas Ian Griffith would want to come back to act. We didn’t know that we would get the rights to The Karate Kid. You just go in hoping and then you see what you get and you then figure out the story from there. We didn’t want to make any announcement about it because we like the idea of fans not knowing and those expectations being out there. But just because she isn’t there, doesn’t mean that in some way, shape, or form in the future, fans can’t see that character come back because we remain fans of both Hilary and the character. That’s how the dice rolled.”

Since it didn’t happen, could you share your thoughts on what Julie was up to now?

Jon Hurwitz: “As Hayden said, we didn’t get into great detail. We had a lot of ideas as to what she was up to. How she may have impacted this story was she was a student of Mr. Miyagi like Daniel was. She was the only other living student of Miyagi. So in the season where Daniel is going through all these challenges and learning new things about Miyagi and trying to reconcile this new information with the man that he knew, Julie may have been a character that could have come in with a perspective and knowledge of things that Daniel didn’t know about. There was potential there for her there.

She also could have potentially been involved in some guidance to characters like Tory and Sam in these back five as well. We had ideas of the kinds of character, I should say story impact that worked with our character stories. We had ideas beyond that as to what was going on in her character’s life, but I’d rather hold off on that stuff because you never know if one day she decides that she’d love to jump back into this universe in some way and we could explore that stuff on our own in collaboration with her.”

Is the Back to the Future pitch we hear in the last scene a real pitch you wanted to make for a Back to the Future series?

Josh Heald: “That’s a real pitch. I don’t think we’ll ever get in the door with that team because the Bobs [Gale and Zemeckis] who are in charge of the Back to the Future universe are fairly intent to let that franchise sit and we completely respect that. That being said, if they’re bowled over and inspired by what we’ve said in our seven seconds of screen time, we have a lot more to say but we’re not going to push the issue because we have nothing but love for them and their wishes.”

To borrow a phrase from another series, but has Cobra Kai also been about with great power comes great responsibliity?

Hayden Schlossberg: “The thing that I’ve always found interesting with Cobra Kai, there’s different forms of power. There’s defense and there’s offense. Johnny’s been on this journey of figuring out that both can have their place in the world. For Johnny, the trick is strike first, strike hard, no mercy is traditionally the philosophy that we say is the evil philosophy, the bad philosophy. Johnny’s found a way to make that something that empowers the kids in a way that they could use.

A big thing for us was realizing, ‘Okay, what’s a good moment in your life for a no mercy philosophy?’ It’s really just the kids who get walked on or the people who get walked on. The person who’s maybe a little too nice that needs to stand up for themselves a little bit more or be a little bit tougher, given a leadership position or something like that. That’s the type of things that Johnny as a drill sergeant can instill.

So it’s a deeper exploration of power, the specific types of power and when they’re good and when they’re bad. We try to humanize every single philosophy because there are people in life that are more passive and there’s people in life that are more aggressive. You don’t feel like there’s any one right answer and that’s the message that Johnny gives at the end of the season. It is a story about this power, one that Mr. Miyagi gave to Daniel, one that Kreese gave to Johnny. We explore it throughout the series.”

What’s next for you, another series or more movies?

Josh Heald: “We’re still here at Sony developing television. Obviously, we love features as well so we have a few tentacles in that world right now. We’ll see what comes to light first, but first and foremost we love what we do in television. We love how fast television moves from idea inception to putting something on the screen. So we’re working in lockstep with Sony to figure out what that next big tentpole series is going to be.”

What would Obliterated season two have been?

Hayden Schlossberg: “We talked about a Miami backdrop, a wild party backdrop but that had ocean and water involved. We talked about there being a wedding for a couple of the characters where everybody gets drunk and wasted, and then a major national emergency happens at the height of it.

We’re still hopeful that there’s a way somehow someway that we can revisit that world and those characters. We’ve seen crazier things happen. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle came out and was not a hit in theaters that opening weekend but then it really built an audience over time. We’ve seen a lot of reaction for Obliterated online since it’s been out. It’s one of the most watched Netflix titles that they’ve had in the past couple years. Those stats have been out there. There’s always that hope that the cult fanbase builds and we’re ready to explore further in any iteration, whether that’s a movie, a limited, or whatever. We just had a blast making that and would always encourage people to tune in and it’s a very unique, original show.”

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