A former Karate Kid foe is stepping back in the dojo: Thomas Ian Griffith is joining Cobra Kai‘s fourth season, reprising his role of Terry Silver, TVLine has learned.
One of the main antagonists of the film franchise (watch Netflix’s teaser clip below), Silver was one of the original co-founders of Cobra Kai, as well as the dojo’s corporate owner. A close friend of John Kreese’s from his military days, Silver hatched a plan to help Kreese get revenge on Daniel LaRusso in the third film, tricking Daniel-san to train with him so he could set him up to lose to Mike Barnes in the All Valley Karate Tournament. The plan failed, and we haven’t seen Silver since.
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“Since the beginning of the series, we’ve been carefully orchestrating the right moment to unleash Cobra Kai dojo co-founder Terry Silver back into the universe,” executive producers/writers Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg said in a statement. “That moment is now. We can’t wait for the whole world to experience Thomas Ian Griffith’s majestic return to the franchise.”
In the Season 3 finale, Kreese made a phone call to an old friend, leading many to speculate that Silver would, indeed, make his long-awaited return to the series. The show’s EPs talked to TVLine in January about Silver’s possible re-emergence: “On our show, we try to bring back the original actor who played characters in the past as much as possible,” Hurwitz said at the time. “We all loved the character of Terry Silver in The Karate Kid 3 and his portrayal by Thomas Ian Griffith, so if that character was to return for Season 4, we’d hope that he’d be the one playing him.”
Griffith is far from the first guest-actor to reprise a role in the Miyagi-verse. Last season, Elisabeth Shue made a surprise return as Ali Mills for a pair of episodes, while Karate Kid Part 2 actors Yuji Okumoto and Tamlyn Tomita appeared as Chozen and Kumiko, respectively.
Surprised Terry Silver is putting his uniform back on? And what will this mean for the newly merged Eagle Fang/Miyagi-Do crew? Watch the teaser below, then sound off in the Comments!
