By all accounts, John Kreese was the bad guy.
Throughout the classic franchise’s first three films, The Karate Kid parts I, II and III, John Kreese inflicts severe trauma on his students and rivals with instinctive ease. By way of his infamous Cobra Kai dojo, the Vietnam War veteran transforms insecure teenagers into quasi-militaristic bullies. Case in point: He’s a grown, buys-his-own-groceries adult who’s warped enough to purposely injure a high schooler in an amateur karate tournament. And yet, over 35 years later, Kreese has been given a tragic layer of humanity, courtesy of the screenwriters for Cobra Kai, a Karate Kid spinoff that focuses on Kreese’s struggling former disciple Johnny Lawrence and his thriving high school rival, Daniel LaRusso (aka “the good guy”).
Over four seasons, we learn the painful details of Kreese’s backstory, including his mother’s suicide, his experience getting bullied and the life-or-death situations he faced during the Vietnam War. The difficult experiences in his life make it just a bit easier to understand why he became so hardened, and why “no mercy” became his signature catchphrase and, ultimately, the ethos of Cobra Kai.
Kreese’s expanded character arc in Cobra Kai is one that Martin Kove, who plays Kreese, insisted upon. While considering a return to the role, he wasn’t interested in rehashing the same one-dimensional portrayal.
“I was quite leery to do it as written for the movies,” Kove shared in a 2020 interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “But my basic insistence to the [Cobra Kai] writers was, ‘Are you going to write this character vulnerably? Are you going to give him some versatile situations?’ ”
Thus far, the answer to this question has been an emphatic yes. The result of the writers’ work is a John Kreese that’s a bit less despicable than the one fans got to know in the 1980s. In the present day, Kreese is weary enough to cry in front of a former student. When he’s not teaching kids to be dirtbags (some things never change), he’s trading in his bad guy badge for some paternal warmth as he helps a student with her rent problems. In Cobra Kai Season 4, he’ll continue this journey — one that will only put more distance between himself and the hollow-villain archetype.
