Cobra Kai Star Martin Kove Reveals an Alternate Ending for His Character — and Why It Didn’t Make the Cut (Exclusive)
The actor told PEOPLE showrunners thought the alternate idea “was a little hokey”
Martin Kove is satisfied with how Cobra Kai’s final season left his character, John Kreese, but there was another way his story could have, and almost did, end.
While speaking exclusively with PEOPLE at the premiere of season 2 of 1923 in Los Angeles, The Karate Kid actor, 77, said there was an alternate ending filmed for his character that was ultimately decided against.
In the final moments of the penultimate episode of the series, Kreese gets into a confrontation on a yacht with Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith). Amid their fighting, the pair knock over a large fuel tank, and Kreese later takes his cigar and throws it into the fuel, setting off an explosion that destroys the boat and presumably kills them both. Their bodies, however, are not seen in the aftermath.
“A lot of the fans think that the character, he should have come out of the water and survived, [and] we did shoot a scene like that,” Kove said. “We did shoot a scene where … I’m smoking the cigar and I grab a magazine.”
“It implies in episode 15 [the series finale] that he didn’t die, but they didn’t use it because they thought it was a little hokey,” he continued, referencing Cobra Kai showrunners. “The ship was such a big explosion. But I understood the motivation.”
According to Kove, Kreese’s death could be looked at as “questionable anyway, because my character always comes out of the dark of the cliffhanger.”
“So even though it’s the last season, it’ll live on because Cobra Kai never dies,” he added.
Jon Hurwitz, one of Cobra Kai’s creators and showrunners, spoke about the alternate ending in a Feb. 20 Instagram post.
Sharing an image of a fake magazine with Silver on the cover, which he said was crafted by the show’s “incredible prop master, Eric Bates,” Hurwitz said it was going to be used to “imply that Kreese was still alive” but was dropped “once we saw what the boat explosion looked like.”
“At the end of the day, we wanted our finale to end triumphantly and with credibility — not with an absurd confirmation that somehow John Kreese survived that fiery blast,” he further explained.
As for his feelings on his character overall, Kove told PEOPLE he was pleased with Kreese’s progression throughout the show.
“I’ve been pushing vulnerability for this character for a long time, and sometimes he gets it, sometimes he doesn’t,” he said.
“But the way it ended … it just was rich,” Kove added. “It’s what I like to do more than kicking ass and all that.”
“I like the fact that they took the character all the way from the darkest place in Karate Kid,” he continued. “I signed on to do the deal only if they’d write vulnerable scenes and show how he got to be the way he was, and they did, slowly, in five seasons, exactly what I wanted to do.”
Cobra Kai, which premiered in May 2018, served as a sequel series to the original The Karate Kid films, with Ralph Macchio and William Zabka reprising their roles of Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence, respectively.
The Emmy-nominated series is set decades after the films and sees Kove’s Kreese take over the Cobra Kai Dojo from Zabka’s Lawrence in hopes of guiding a new generation of karate kids.
