Cobra Kai has been promising the Sekai Taikai since Season 5. When Season 6 Part 1 ended, Miyagi-Do had finally arrived in Barcelona for it, only to find Tori re-joined the Cobra Kai team. Part 2, premiering on Netflix on Friday, November 15, 2024, shows all the fighting events and introduces new international competitors
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Sensei Wolf (Lewis Tan) leads the Iron Dragons and wait until you see Zara (Rayna Vallandingham) and Axel (Patrick Luwis). Plus, Miyagi-Do still has Kwon (Brandon H. Lee) to contend with at Cobra Kai.
Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg, and Josh Heald spoke with Showbiz Junkies for a Zoom interview about Part 2 of Cobra Kai Season 6. The trio will also be back after Friday to discuss spoilers.
The Sekai Taikai has several different tournament styles: battle royale, tag team, and more. How did you come up with different creative ways you could explore fighting, and was there anything your stunt coordinators said, “That’s too much?”
Jon Hurwitz: “It was a real delicate balance overall with everything. First of all, it started from a place of character. It was like okay, who are the characters that we have at the Sekai Taiki and each of these fights needs to be meaningful in some way? So, it would be whether there’s something going on with the characters emotionally, the inner personal issues within the teams and then the rivals that they’re fighting with. So, you’re starting from a place of that and how much character you can achieve through these fights.
But beyond that, our thought was we want this to not be the All-Valley. Mike Barnes built this thing up and for years they’ve been talking about it as something that is more dangerous, that they’re throwing things at you that you’ve never done before, that are unpredictable. And that’s what we wanted to have this feeling for the audience of you don’t know what the next event’s going to be. You’re not expecting the same kind of fight and to have our characters sometimes tagging in and out or fighting on the mat at the same time or doing some balance type events suspended high above the ground, we wanted there to be these elements of danger.
It was challenging because we make the show on not the largest budget, believe it or not. It’s got the pace of making television, which is a lot different than making movies, but we wanted this to be spectacular. So, we had all these ideas. We would talk with our stunt team and our production team and find out okay, what can we do? Everyone was game for everything and everyone was game to try to pull off everything that we could.
I think the biggest challenges for us was in the dream world, each event would be in a different, spectacular location and you’re in the middle of some ancient ruins while fighting in one thing or in the jungle for another thing. These were the kinds of things we were talking about in the writers room. At the end of the day, the events themselves were just a great collaboration between our stunt performers, our production team, our actors, everyone and our writers to really put a lot of thought into making this different and unique, and then our editors eventually. It was a whole group effort.”
You had a brainstorm version where each round might have been in a different location?
Josh Heald: “It could look like Street Fighter 2. You could have events on a beach. You could have events at the top of a building. In the blue-sky version of what this is, that even goes back to thinking about where the Sekai Taikai is. That goes to the earliest days of writing the final season before we even knew it was going to be Barcelona. Once you get deeper into production and you get tied to a city and you get tied to a venue, you naturally will put more guardrails on that. But in the $5 billion version of this, yeah, one of the events takes place in the clouds. You want it to just be the most cinematic, the most unexpected.”
And yet, the movies didn’t have a stable of martial artists or a cast who’d trained for six years. Is that one advantage of coming to the end of the series?
Hayden Schlossberg: “Absolutely. The thrill of shooting Season 6 is that you’re seeing our young actors who’ve been on this show now for seven years some of them at a stage of martial arts that we don’t actually need stunt doubles at all times. It’s really amazing. There’s a certain way of fighting in front of the camera that they are so used to by now and the relationships between our actors and stunt coordinators are so good that by Season 6, it really is just a great machine.
Then adding into that actual experienced martial artists who push our non-martial artists even further, it led to the best fighting that we’ve had. Definitely the best fighting that this franchise has had up to this point. We knew as we were shooting the second part that this feels like the highest level of martial arts that the franchise has had. That continues into Part 3.”
Did you audition new martial artists for all of the Iron Dragons and Dublin Fighters?
Jon Hurwitz: “It played a factor in who we were casting for those roles. Many of the performers on the other teams outside of the Iron Dragons and our teams were stunt performers first, as opposed to actors first. Many of them were just stunt performers who auditioned as actors. When it came to those characters, it was martial arts experience was a plus.
For Lewis, that was somebody we knew had a lot of martial arts experience and also had a lot of acting experience. So, he was going to square up across from our senseis in a real strong way from the beginning.
Rayna, who plays Xara, was somebody who we’ve been tracking on social media for a while. She has these phenomenal videos. She’s like a tornado. It’s unbelievable how quick she moves and how accomplished she is in the martial arts community, very much like Brandon Lee was. The question was can she act? We were very pleased when we saw in her auditions that she was really, really strong.
Patrick actually had less martial arts experience but had enough experience in sports and dance, but he brought a lot to the character beyond that. We were looking for that sort of Drago type character, somebody who is larger than life that feels like more powerful and a stronger force than our characters have ever had to square off against. He was different than anybody else we had ever had and he was a quick study with the martial arts team. They were all blown away with the amount of work that he put in and he was really strong.”
So Brandon H. Lee was also a trained martial artist?
Jon Hurwitz: “He’s like a 10 to 12 time World Champion. He was another one that when we were auditioning for the role of Kwon, any time we’re auditioning for any of the characters on the show that are going to have martial arts, we always ask our casting directors cast a wide net to people beyond just traditional actors. Go to stunt performers. Brandon happened to be somebody who had been working on his acting. He came from the stunt community but had been working to be an actor and had started acting before the show. Reina, this was her first big acting job.”
Was it fun to pay homage to other sports movies like A League of Their Own and Rocky II quoting their famous lines?
Josh Heald: “You can’t help it in the writers room, especially, just drawing comparisons and finding those allusions. The Kumite was a big one as we started to think about this international competition of monstrous athletes coming together to have a bloody fight. You always find those turns of phrase. Even on the cutting room floor there’s probably five or 10 more Rocky universe quotes that didn’t make it because it just became overload. You have to moderate it as well but it’s playing in a candy store, not overeating.”
- Cobra Kai Season Six Split Into Three Parts
- Cobra Kai Season 6: Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg and Josh Heald on Part 1 and That Upcoming Jackie Chan/Ralph Macchio Movie
- Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg, and Josh Heald Interview on Season 6 Part 2 with Spoilers
- Spoiler Interview: Cobra Kai Creators on Finale Cameos, Deaths, and Resolutions
