When Thomas Ian Griffith, who made his screen debut playing the psychotic baddie Terry Silver in The Karate Kid Part III ,first heard of Cobra Kai, he was completely unimpressed. "I heard they were doing a TV show based on the Karate Kid series. And thought, 'Oh my God, this will be a disaster,'" the 59-year-old says from his Los Angeles home. "My wife and I tuned into YouTube one day, watched the pilot episode, and we were blown away. And just binged the first season going, 'This is smart, it's irreverent, it's funny, it's nostalgia.' It had all those great ingredients." But Griffith didn't bust out his black gi or his character's signature ponytail quite yet. He figured because the show focused on the OG characters (like Ralph Macchio's Daniel LaRusso and William Zabka's Johnny Lawrence) that he probably wasn't going to get the call anytime soon. It didn't help that he retired from acting to become a writer years prior, culminating in a stint on NBC's fantasy series Grimm. When it seemed more and more likely that his character might make his way back to that Reseda strip mall dojo, he wasn't sure that's what he wanted. "I was on the fence," he says. "It's like, how are they going to bring this bigger-than-life character to this world? And how would he fit in? And what has he been doing for the last 30 years?". To say Terry Silver is larger-than-life is, frankly, an understatement. He's almost a cartoon version of what a karate film villain would look like. As originally written, Silver is John Kreese's Vietnam war buddy and silent partner in the Cobra Kai dojo who made himself a fortune dumping toxic sludge all over Asia while making deals half-naked in a sauna talking into a cell phone the size of a large brick. How could you turn this guy into an actual character? "When creators [Jon Hurwitz, Josh Heald, and Hayden Schlossberg] contacted me, we did a Zoom, and they had answered all those questions," Griffith says. "They had mapped this incredible backstory." That's it. He was sold, and his first screen role would be the thing that got him out of the writers' room and back in front of the camera. Though he had kept up his karate practice in the intervening years, he was still nervous until his first day on set. "I just had this very freeing feeling, walking on saying, 'This is my space. I own this,'" he says about getting back into the acting spirit as easily as he left it.
Scritto da il
05-03-2025 alle ore 08:30
Consiglia
Voto
Nessun dato in archivio
Commenti
Nessun dato in archivio
